What about Words?

Language is communication. The best way to learn to communicate is, shockingly, by communicating.

If you can't move to an english speaking country to learn, be happy you're in the modern age. Movies, music, podcasts, bulletin boards, reddit, there are literally a million opportunities to practice the new skills you gain. It's up to you to find the ones you'll really use.

That's why I've chosen not to include vocabulary with the cards. I don't think I should tell people what words are useful. How on earth do I know what might be useful for you? Are the same words useful for a sculptor as for a mechanic? Unlikely. So it seemed the best way forward was to encourage people to figure out for themselves how to build their own most useful vocabularies. If you watch a sculpting podcast and a word is repeated three times, chances are it's going to be worth learning. If after watching 50 movies you hear a word you've only ever heard once, how useful do you think that word will be? Building the skill to decide what's likely to be useful and what's not seems to far outweigh the downside of not having a list pre-compiled. Plus, we're all practical at heart, we're much more likely to put the time into learning something when we're sure there's a use down the road.

Prefixes and suffixes, however, are a different beast entirely. Learn -ize and you can build 42,000 words for yourself. Even if it's not a "real" word, any reasonably intelligent speaker of english will immediately know what you mean.

My advice is to make your own 'english book'. Keep it in your pocket. Every time you learn a new pattern, write it down. Every time you hear a word or pattern over and over, write it down then figure out what it is. Learn to build your own language acquisition skills. If you're really clever, you can stop using the cards at level two and figure the rest out for yourself ; )