Vocabulary Development Quotes

To be functionally fluent in a language, for instance, in most cases you need about 1,200 words. To acquire a total of vocabulary words, if you really train someone well they can acquire 200 to 300 words a day, which means that in a week they can acquire the vocabulary necessary to speak a language.

A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.

We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.

I never really thought I had an extensive vocabulary like that, and I'm not an avid reader. I didn't read a lot growing up - at all.

I don't change the language for children books. I don't make the language simpler. I use words that they might have to look up in the dictionary. The books are shorter, but there's just not that much difference other than that to be honest. And the funny thing is, I have adult writer friends [to whom I would say], "Would you think of writing a children's book?" and they go, "No, God, I wouldn't know how." They're quite intimidated by the concept of it. And when I say to children's books writers, would they write an adult book, they say no because they think they're too good for it.

Reading taught me how to write.

When I was in high school, I started learning English as my second foreign language, but my level of English at that time was very average.

As children we hoard and gloat over words. Words give ownership: we name our world and we claim it...Children trust the power of words.

The devil take these people and their language! They take a dozen monosyllabic words in their jaws, chew them, crunch them and spit them out again, and call that speaking. Fortunately they are by nature fairly silent, and although they gaze at us open-mouthed, they spare us long conversations.

I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.

When I was little, seven or eight years old, in third and fourth grade, I would always try to use long words and stuff.

I've got a little baby, I made him...He doesn't speak, he's 2...He's a slow learner, he's only got 2 words...car and map...I'm slightly worried he's trying to escape. If his next word is passport we are in serious trouble!

As sheer casual reading matter, I still find the English dictionary the most interesting book in our language.

Something like reading depends a lot on just having people around you who talk to you and read you books, more than sitting down and, say, doing a reading drill when you're 3 or 4 years old.

Children pick up words as pigeons peas And utter them again as God shall please.

If you want to work on the core problem, it's early school literacy.

That's the great thing about being in the third grade. If you've got one polysyllabic adjective, everyone thinks you're a genius.

The first and most common reason for not being a fluent reader is that the child does not yet know how to decode very well yet. They lack automatic decoding skills, and this prevents them from being able to read accurately, much less smoothly and quickly. Decoding accuracy is the first prerequisite to fluency.

My principal commitment is playing the piano. But I always loved words.

It is the children between five and seven who are the word-lovers. It is they who show a predisposition toward such study. Their undeveloped minds can not yet grasp a complete idea with distinctness. They do, however, understand words. And they may be entirely carried away by their ecstatic, their tireless interest in the parts of speech.

I think the cardinal rule of learning to write is learning to read first. I learned to write by learning to read.

I work a lot on words, so if I hear a word or see a word or a phrase or a sentence that someone says to me it just immediately sparks a concept.

The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, "words, words, words," must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn.

My mother taught me how to write.