As the number of English vocabularies required by my English literature teacher is increasing, I am now confronting a great problem memorizing them in a short time. Simple words are okay to me, but it's especially difficult when I come across words with crazy suffixes and prefixes or with tricky interchangeable prefixes (such as proclaim, declaim, acclaim, reclaim, disclaim and exclaim).
Since I'm a clever guy (or I just made up :D), I found out a post somewhere written by a Chinese, which was upvoted to the top of the "English Learning" category, and therefore I read it carefully. This post greatly recommends folks to make use of word roots. The writer argues that it can help you spell it correctly, remember the accurate definition, and deal with multiple evolved meanings of a word.
Personally, most of my English vocabularies are remembered by rote memorization, which is, as I have experienced it in person, super inefficient. Since I am convinced by this post, I would like to change my out-of-date method into this new one and give it a shot. However, I would like to know more before I get started.
Thus, would you like to give me your perspective to this method and show off your personal way of English word memorization?
By the way, Word Power Made Easy by Norman Lewis was mentioned in that guy's post.
After reading such a number of reasonable, detailed and helpful answers, I ruminated and decided not to second (in fact, I did :D) any answer here to avoid leaving future confusion to visitors to this post. Every answer here is super delicious, and thus it's hard to judge a BEST one. And, I believe, everyone have his/her own ways of vocabularies acquisition so it depends. Am I right? o(^v^)o
At last, sincere thanks to everyone who generously answered this post and gave me their interesting perspectives. ;D
Best Answer
First, I think I would say that native speakers do not learn most words by memorizing roots. The most common vocabulary is acquired by rote memorization in the first 12 years or so of life. Furthermore, about 26% of words in English are Germanic in origin, with a greater percentage among common words, and these roots are rarely taught, with most courses focusing on Latin or Greek roots.
That being said, when learning specialized and technical (read: Greek-derived and Latin-derived) vocabulary later in life, most native speakers do learn the roots. Many test preparation guides recommend some knowledge of roots for standarized tests such as the GRE or SAT, where testers can benefit from making educated guesses. Learning roots can help one remember words (again, most often of the technical variety). Example: many educated native speakers know that the word analgesia comprises the roots an-, meaning not or none, and algesia, from the Greek Ἄλγος, meaning pain. Nearly every native speaker knows that the root phobia refers to fear. If I asked a native speaker what algophobia meant, they would stand a good chance of guessing that it referred to fear of pain. Even if they did not, once they understood the meaning, it would be quite easy to associate it with analgesia in their mind.
So roots are useful, but most native speakers did not use them to learn their base vocabulary. Refer and defer share a root, but few could tell you what it means. (It comes from the Latin ferre, meaning to carry).