The Wizard of Oz Vocabulary Builder Book

This author definitely saved me close to one or two years of hardship.

With this book and the Pinnocchio Intermediate Vocabulary Builder, the author has done it for me. I was about to do the same for The Sherlock Holmes Complete works, but then I realized that I might be reinventing the wheel. So I went online and searched for someone, a predecessor who has done something similar. I have come to the same conclusion i.e. a word can be remembered better if it is memorized in context i.e. within a story as opposed to memorizing it with rote memory, which will be lost anyway.

My epic journey beings, when I wanted to understand how to become a Coder. After researching for a while, I thought, Since coding is a computer language and English/others are Natural Languages, If I can understand how Writers become writers, then I can use that to induce how coders become coders. So I started searching for books that taught "How to become a writer?". I read close to a dozen books written by successful writers revealing their techniques and tools for writing. During this journey, I came across a concept called "Vocabulary Toolkit", a quiver of 10,000 arrows, ready to be used, as proposed by the great Horror Writer - Stephen King in his book - On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft Also another writer, Kevin Flannigan who wrote about the concept of Active and Passive Vocabulary i.e. a person can understand word that is used, but he cannot use that word for his own speech or writing. Because he does not own it. Alas, the book written by him, Building a Better Vocabulary, though he used the origin story of the word i.e. greek, latin, germanic roots, but they were not enough to crate a hook for the memory. I also understood the hook and the groove method to make memories that last. Hook is the primary context/the story that should be embedded into your mind,firmly through a very impressionable story. (Remember the time you were embarassed by your teacher during a class, when you attend an important meeting and your mind suddenly throws the memory into your head, even though you don't want to hear it!). Our mind remembers something using EMOTION as the guiding factor, something that made you extremely emotional i.e. happy, sad, embarassed, disgusted, horrified, has more emotional weight than something that is just bland, if you think that something has more importance because there is more money in it, you can't force your mind to give it extra weightage. Our mind only gives importance to something that has emotional quotient. Thus to make a good hook, you need emotion and the best way to create emotion is though a well told story, or the cheapest way. If you have to create all emotions first hand, then you would end up spending millions of rupees to create real life emotional incidents for each of the 10,000 words in the vocabulary. The reason why our mother tongue is so powerful is that for each word used, there is a real life reference associated, which has a very strong hook in it. Creating a hook is extremely difficult, this is also the reason why a hook works very well, when you go into a foreign land and learn a new language as opposed to living in your home town and trying to acquire French. Because each time you use a word, there is a memory made with it, but when you sit in a classroom and memorize those words there are no real life experiences associated with it. This is how the Hook works, after the hook we have the groove. Each time you drag the hook with a thread, a groove is formed. Each time you recollect a memory, you mind starts to add a thread to it, if you have recollected a memory/word 100 times, i.e. there is a huge rope with 100 small thread twined to it and a huge grooved formed, by dragging the hook each time you need it. Thus a very good goat path has formed for this word by now. I was also apprehensive about my research, which by this time has taken more than a decade of my life. From my B.E. Hons to MBA to Five years in my job and my research kept going ahead with no end in sight, but I wasn't desperate either. I was willing to wait it out. But then when I understood the concept of the HOOK AND GROOVE and the contexts I started working on the idea. The result of this idea is "Sherlock Holmes - Vocabulary Builder" - Every word gets its own story! Check out this article for reference -

Each article took atleast an hour to compose. At that rate it would take me years before I could complete Sherlock Holmes, I was disappointed, but not discouraged. I was willing to go the distance, call it "Sunk Cost Fallacy", or call it my obstinate behavior, either way I was not willing to give up so easy. But then I found this book and my spirits went up. I was happy that somebody has taken the pains to help me out. I read the entire book back to back, to understand if this would actually work.

This was not the first book, that was meant to improve my vocabulary.

Earlier I was disappointed by two other works that promised to improve my vocabulary.

Word Power Made Easy

Word Power made easy, is a book that presumes that you can remember words if you can get to their roots, but alas, you can't remember the roots i.e. etymology since there is often zero emotional attachment to it.

Building a Better Vocabulary

Also, tried to infuse vocabulary without associating a context to it. Which made it almost impossible to get there.

The Wizard of Oz Vocabulary builder adds context to the mix. Which is a huge pivot from the traditional approaches of trying to provide the meaning, or roots or other facts about the word without adding any context, story or emotion. I am happy to have found this book and its much younger twin.

But, this technique also has its limits, though it is very successful at establishing the hook, this technique is very weak at pulling the hook to make a groove or to tie 1000 different threads to the same hook and pull it when needed, both of which don't seem to happen.

Nevertheless, It saved me close to half a decade of research and toil.