Kevin Flanigan

Kevin shares a great strategy for expanding vocabulary. It involves getting a word’s definition, hearing or seeing it in context (scenarios or sentences are provided), making connections (applying the word to someone or something in your own life), examining the word’s etymology and/or morphology (how did the word join the English language and what path has it taken since it did, and semantic chunking (classifying the word in a subject category [we librarians love this stuff]). He also tells us to start a vocabulary notebook, writing all these things down for each word.
Kevin says there’s a debate as to how many words are in the English language and it depends on whether you count the words with their affixes separately, but that the Oxford English Dictionary has about 600,000. He says the average high school graduate knows 25-50 thousand words and the average college graduate knows 75 thousand. Learning words isn’t done in a flash, but rather, iteratively—a person generally needs to encounter a word about 15 times before being comfortable enough to adopt it---so I figured I’d probably have to listen to this book more than once. Even the third time I heard words that hadn’t sunk in the first two times—even to the point where, had I not known better, I probably would have sworn I’d never heard them. The stories he tells to get the words in context are entertaining . . .the first two times. By the third time I confess to fast forwarding through a couple of them. . .and not a big fan of games, I fast forwarded through the chapter on teaming up with others and making them guess what word your thinking of by giving single word definition hints and the number of syllables. I think crossword puzzles would be easier—at least with those, you have a chance of having some letter hints.
So, while I was on my third listen, I was also listening to a book with my hubby (no, silly, not simultaneously) called “Enlightenment Now” by Stephen Pinker, and was astonished at how many words I’d learned from Kevin were used by Stephen. I’d have wondered if Kevin read Stephen’s book and plucked out words that sounded uncommon, except that Kevin’s audiobook came out years before Stephen’s. How fun, I’m edging up to those 15 encounters already!
So, my only criticism would be . . .and it’s completely unfair of me because I know I don’t speak clearly when I’m in a public speaking situation . . .and there it is---there were often times when I didn’t understand either the target word being explained, or the words used to explain them. One stands out because it was frequently uttered, Kevin would say, “Ok, now let’s play the siduation game.” His “t” was almost always a “d” in that word, and often in others, or so absorbed that I didn’t hear it at all. I almost wished he’d spell each target word, but I know that would have added to the already long length of the audiobook. It’s not glaringly obvious, and it really doesn’t detract—I Googled some of the words based on what I thought I heard, and eventually found them, and that sort of added to the process of hopefully keeping them in my brain, so it’s all good.
… (more)