Vocabulary

Comfort zone

• Children are not shy and tend to pick up words — often in multiple languages — quickly and easily.
• As people grow older, most tend to live within their comfort zone. Such people probably add only 10 – 20 new words a year.

Necessity and Assimilation

• My friend’s younger brother and sister are medical doctors from Burma who did not know Chinese. They chose to work in Taiwan. After working there for a year, they felt at ease communicating in Chinese. Assimilation helps improve one’s vocabulary.
• During the Japanese occupation, several Burmese mastered Japanese quickly.

Improving one’s vocabulary

• To expand or refine one’s vocabulary, one could and should take extra effort.
• In our younger days, we learned from a Reader’s Digest section “It pays to increase your word power” by Wilfred Funk, co-compiler of the Funk and Wagnall’s dictionary.
• We studied Vocabulary Books which cover a lesson a day for three to six weeks.
• With the rise of Broadcasting and Internet, it is easy to grow one’s vocabulary. One could subscribe to a program similar to (a) “Word of the Day” by Merriam Webster (b) “Word for the Wise“by National Public Radio (NPR).