subject: Learn English with Visual Thesaurus [print this page] Learn English with Visual Thesaurus Learn English with Visual Thesaurus
At the very beginning, you can get away with some basic vocabulary. If you know enough to ask questions, express your thoughts and maintain a conversation, it means that you are going to be just fine when it comes to your daily routine. You can ask for directions when lost, order food at the restaurant, talk to your friends about your day and try wowing your date with the story of your life. This is a great beginning. However, as you go further in your English studies, you will realize that in order to move to the next level and become a fluent and eloquent speaker, you need to work on increasing your English vocabulary. When it comes to learning new words, everyone has a method that works the best. For some students, it's necessary to write down the words and their translations while others prefer working with flash cards. For those of you who rely on visual memory in your studies and everyday life, you might use Visual Thesaurus to increase your English vocabulary, and dramatically so.
Fortunately, there is a way to overcome this weakness. Good working vocabulary is one of the defining factors in your success as an ESL Student. Of course, that does not mean you should start memorizing dictionary entries in alphabetical order. As we might have mentioned before, a bit of creativity and a lot of dedication go a long way toward your progress with studies. What if new words, along with their etymology, meaning and pronunciation, were selected at random and sent to you every day and all you'd have to do was to read and memorize them and then impress your friends and classmates with your English vocabulary? You can't perfect your English overnight, but what you can and should do is to learn a little every day, so let's start with an absolute minimum one word.
Visual thesaurus creates word maps with relations between words. For example, a visual map for a word "visit" will look like this (the image from Dictionary.com):
You can regroup the words by clicking on any of them and every time you do that you see a different map representing the semantic relationships between words and concepts.
Visual Thesaurus has more than 145,000 words and 115,000 meanings. Read more about Desktop and online editions of Visual Thesaurus and take a look at the VT magazine about writing, words, language and creative process.
