Reading Newspaper

I got the second weekly English newspaper, NYT on Monday. The newspaper has 8 pages in a week. I'm trying to read at least two articles everyday. 

The articles are hard to read for me. I have to use diction at so often. I mainly use an online English-English dictionary, Vocabulary.com. The app is really nice, because it has up-to-date example sentences in it. The samples would be updated every minute.

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Word's Word

I bought a picture dictionary at BookOff. The book was titled "Word's Word" and had 25,000 words with colored pictures. You can check special terms from astronomy to weapons. These words looked very specific, but common words for about English speakers. 

This dictionary was a little bit outdated because it was published in 1993, but still works well. It's easy to search terms with illustrations. 

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Dictionary of Cliches

I came across a book called Dictionary of Cliches in my book shelf. I forgot about the book completely. I bought it around four or five years ago. It was too difficult to understand for me then, but now I've found that it's a really interesting book. The dictionary is mainly translated into Japanese by a famous translator Motoyuki Shibata. 

I believe it helps me when I read novels and news articles. It's a dictionary, but it also a good book to read in my free time. 

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Electric Dictionary

For getting more English vocabularies, which is efficient, using word books or dictionaries? 

Some English teacher said on his blog that reading English books with dictionaries is the best way for vocabulary building. That is because a dictionary can describe various definitions of a word so that you can select suitable image of the word in the sentences. On the other hand, word books have only a limited defining for a word. 

I think that's a good way for getting new words, but it might take quite a time. So for time efficiency, an electric dictionary is needed. It's time for buy it, isn't it?

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To Be Friends with Dictionaries

I have more than 60 English books to read, both kindle and paper ones. There are different types of books, novels, none fictions, reference books and so on. 

Sidney Sheldon is the author of whom I have most numbers of books. I have nine of his books and I have read only one book. It was The Master of the Game and it was really nice. 

I swear I'll read at least two of them this year. Really. 

I didn't care much about unfamiliar words in the books when I read them before, but I think I never get understand the meaning of them unless I check them in the dictionaries or something. 

I need to be friends with the dictionaries. Indeed. 

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Old Fashioned Words

I'm reading a book titled Twelve Years a Slave. It was first published in 1853, one year after Uncle Tom's Cabin was published. 

I've found lots of unfamiliar words in the book and I look up these words in the dictionary. Many of them are said as old fashioned words. 

Thinking of 1853, it was Edo era in Japan. Words can change in such a long period of time. I shouldn't spend a long time to check those old words so I'll guess the meaning while I read the novel.

Looked Up English Words

I read seven pages of TIME magazine yesterday and looked up 91 words in a dictionary. And today, I joted down that words in a new notebook. It took a quite long time to do that but I believe it would help me a lot.