My Experience Learning New English Vocabulary as a Native Speaker

Last week, I gave myself the mission of learning new vocabulary in English.

This vocabulary, at times arcane, was primary acquired through the Wordbook app produced by the Johnson O’Connor foundation.

I took the Johnson O’Connor aptitude test about one and a half years ago.

I was at a point of uncertainty with regards to what I should do with my career.

Multiple attempts at being a software engineer led to lackluster results.

I had moved back to the tri-state area the prior May to work as a contractor at a large medical imaging company, where I was hired to make an algorithm faster.

I did not manage to make the algorithm any faster, at least as far as I could measure.

I thought at that point about how I managed to get these engineering jobs without issue, yet I was not performing them well unless the task could be performed by ChatGPT.

The Johnson O’Connor test confirmed my presumption that I had a strong natural inclination for Sales & Marketing, while I did not maintain the aptitude of a computer programmer.

Most importantly, they remarked that no matter what line of work I am engaged in, improving my vocabulary would assist me in doing a better job.

At a continual dilemma as to what I will do with my education and past experience as an engineer and how I will manage to leverage my skills to do something truly great, last week I decided to return to the vocabulary advice from the testers.

I remained skeptical about whether vocabulary is truly the cause of strong performance.

Could it be rather the predilection an individual has for reading which is truly at play?

I put my skepticism aside and committed to improving my vocabulary each day.

This was bolstered further by remembering how assiduously studying the dictionary word-by-word allowed Malcolm X to acquire his own education, become an engaged reader and emerge into a leadership position within his community.

Each day, I went into the Wordbook app and completed one section, with three wordsets each.

For the words that I did not know, I added the definitions as fill-in-the-blank Cloze cards in the Anki app.

I went through Level 7 with relative elacrity, consolidating the meanings of words into my memory bank. Credulous and seditious slid into my memory alongside rapacious and pertinacious.

When I got to level 8, I learned words like ukase and prolix.

Getting trenchant and umbrage into a cycle of review that required me to figure out how to put the words into a sentence caused me to speak in a more florid manner, and these words carried over into the emails I would send.

I requested a proviso in a provisional tenancy agreement.

I started taking this idea of vocabulary memorisation into my PhD reading. When I read the foundational Biomedical Image Segmentation paper nn-Unet , biological terms like myeloid intermingled with machine learning terms like autoencoder as I committed them all to memory. My understanding of this paper is now stronger than any academic paper I have studied previously.

I started to observe how the cerulean hues of the sky undulate over the course of a day, and I discovered the existence of the colour of amaranth after I spent a few minutes picking up words from the Book of Jacob which lies on a set of drawers unfinished in my living room.

How could I begin to consider this vocabulary to be practical?

Last night, I browsed Hackaday to rekindle an old interest in hardware hacking, and I came across a trending project on Phased Array radar. When I came across the unfamiliar vocabulary it excited me.

I could learn so much from this paper, I thought to myself as I leafed through its contents with my two fingers on my Macbook trackpad and spotted the novel acronyms of SDR and LFM alongside the unfamiliar word of Azimuth and nebulous terms like Frequency Synthesizer Board.

I am now cognizant that a good vocabulary shows an approach to learning. It shows that when you come to something in a text you don’t understand, you figure out what it means. That is a cogent explanation for how a strong vocabulary correlates with success.

To conclude this experiment, I will steadfastly remain on this path of vocabulary acquisition through memorisation. What could be better than ending each day with a marked increase in worldly knowledge as can be observed from the knowledge of words not in yesterday’s lexicon?

With every new word learned comes a new idea learned. The knowledge of words shows you all that you need to know about a subject. With this in mind, let’s see just what Frequency Synthesizer Board means.