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  1. Navigate Home
  3. Television

  4. Building a Better Vocabulary

TELEVISION

Building a Better Vocabulary

Series: Great Courses
4.5
(214)
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Episodes
36
Rating
TVPG
Year
2015
Language
English
Publisher
The Great Courses

About

For anyone who has ever grasped for the perfect word, this course provides a research-based and enjoyable method for improving your vocabulary. Your professor understands the cognitive science behind language acquisition and presents each new word in a way that makes it memorable. But more importantly, he teaches you these tips and strategies so you can apply them whenever you learn a new word.

Related Subjects

  • Educational
  • How To

Episodes

1. Five Principles for Learning Vocabulary

30m

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Toss aside the rote memorization of childhood and explore the cognitive science behind the five core principles of effective vocabulary learning: definition, context, connections, morphology, and semantic chunking. Through interactive examples, see how you can improve your ability to remember the definition of a new word or a long list of familiar terms.

2. The Spelling-Meaning Connection

30m

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Unlock the English language's powerful morphological system with a concept known as the spelling-meaning connection, and see how our spelling system makes a lot more sense than you may have originally thought. Then, learn how to create a vocabulary notebook that effectively organizes all the words you will learn in this course for best recall.

3. Words for Lying, Swindling, and Conniving

30m

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Begin building your vocabulary in earnest with this lecture on wonderful words to describe liars and the lies they tell. Learn trenchant words to describe the cheats, swindlers, charlatans, scam artists, barracudas, sharks, and sharpies, and their hustles, flimflams, and double-dealings. Reveal the nuances of meaning between similar words like specious and spurious.

4. Words That Express Annoyance and Disgust

30m

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Turn now to annoying people and their irksome, vexing, irritating, nettlesome, and exasperating behavior. Tease apart the differences between words that use the Latin root quir/ques, and those that spring from the word queror. Then, study words that describe excess - from sickly sweet, sappy, and sentimental words to downright offensive and disgusting ones.

5. Fighting Words and Peaceful Words

30m

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English is replete with lively, hard-hitting words to describe conflict and harmony. Delve into the morphology and etymology of words relating to war and peace, including examining two high-utility Latin roots, bell and pac. Add some pugnacious words to your everyday lexicon, including melee, contumacious, and donnybrook.

6. Going beyond Dictionary Meanings

30m

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How can you ensure that new words don't slip from your memory? In this lecture, Professor Flanigan shares effective and fun strategies to reinforce your vocabulary knowledge, including a clever graphic organizer that anchors your new word to words you already know, and a game designed by a leading expert in reading and vocabulary.

7. Wicked Words

30m

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Use the Latin prefix mal to generate over a dozen rich vocabulary words, all of which concern things that are bad, evil, or done poorly. Then, learn a fun, albeit archaic, term of contempt, and get a firm understanding of the difference between invidious and insidious.

8. Words for Beginnings and Endings

30m

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Go beyond Latin to learn a word for inexperience that has its roots in Old English. Distinguish between people who are innocent and naive, new to a skill, or pretending to know more than they do. Then, turn to words for endings, and learn why we say "immortal," and not "inmortal."

9. Words Expressing Fear, Love, and Hatred

30m

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Agoraphobia. Xenophobia. Claustrophobia. Begin this lecture with words that describe fear. Then, using the Greek root phil/phile and the Latin root amor, build words relating to love. Finally, embrace your inner misanthrope with words about hatred, which spring from the Greek verb misein.

10. Words for the Everyday and the Elite

30m

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Will you be hobnobbing with the hoity-toity gentry or the hoi polloi? Gain even more words to enrich your vocabulary when it comes to describing things that are ho-hum and others that are high class. You'll even learn a useful synonym for trite remarks, hackneyed phrases, and platitudes.

Extended Details

  • SeriesGreat Courses
  • Closed CaptionsEnglish

Artists

Kevin FlaniganWriter
Kevin FlaniganActor