I am an adult with Asperger Syndrome. I have recently read “The Well-Educated Mind.” I like the idea of being self educated. I am beginning to read some of the great novels. I have a problem though with memorizing vocabulary. Most of the trouble is if a word has more than one meaning. Does anyone know of any good strategies for memorizing vocabulary? :?
Victoria is right, but...
What Victoria is saying is that you have to infer the meaning of the word. Think of how the word relates to the context of the sentence as well as the paragraph and whatnot. You have to try and infer the meaning. To infer is to not guess, really. It is to try and see how the word fits with the sentence. And, I know from personal experience with literature, you have to sometimes read things over a few times in order to be able to infer the meaning of the word. I do that with older forms of English and it is actually really fun to infer the meaning of really weird looking words from the 12th century and the like, it is almost a boring hobby of mine:)
It is not prudent to memorise vocabulary. I was in this weird state of mind where I read and tried to memorise the Oxford Dictionary of Difficult Words, or words to that effect, and it made my eyes hurt, so I never got past the letter “S”.
Dictionaries are cool to read (but not memorise), and I do not think that is bad. My late mother had english as her second language and she read the dictionary all the time to keep her english vocabulary sharp. Sometimes you can learn to increase your vocabulary and even learn little bits of history and philosophy by reading the dictionary. But, you cannot memorise the dictionary or a big ‘ole list of words, with literature it is best to infer.
I know from what I have read on it, that with Aspergers you might really dig memorizing words. But, instead of doing that, why not infer? Then, as the very smart Victoria says, you can use a dictionary as a total last resort and whatnot. You will like to infer, I really bet you will. If you want to just increase your vocabulary, then (don’t laugh) a really good word a day calendar is pretty cool. I increased my Spanish vocabulary with one of those suckers and do not care who knows it! What is really neato also is to write down whatever word you had to take time and figure out. There is something neat is just reading something with a little spiral notebook near you and then you can write down what all words you had to figure out. You can read through this notebook when you fill it up and look back on all you were able to figure out.
What lit. are you reading? I am cool with the metaphysicals, and the British Romantics. If you read anything from any of those lit. scenes then let me know.
Do you want short-term quick tricks whose benefits disappear as fast as they are “learned”, or do you want long-term gain?
I don’t do the quick tricks.
For long-term gain, you want to read connected text with a high vocabulary level. Any kind of text will do, fact or fiction, as long as it gives you a bit of a challenge. When you come to something new, analyze the sentence and figure it out in context. Use a dictionary only as a last resort, after you have done everything you can to work it out on your own. You may want to take notes, but the main exercise is the reading.