After laboring over the process of looking a word up in the dictionary, committing it to memory and then possibly striving to make it apart of my working vocabulary, I began to wonder if there was a better way to deal with unfamiliar words – other than the grunt and grind of memorization. I was thinking that perhaps someone familiar with Latin or Greek could take the root of an unfamiliar word and be able to analyze its meaning. From reading a bit on Wikipedia, however, I learned that the Germanic language did not originate from Latin, and as such, invalidates my hopes for a better way to deal with unfamiliar words. English, it seems, is a Germanic language – unlike French or Spanish. Not all is lost, for studying a new word's morphemes might help with its memorization.
The word, morphemes is a new word for me; so as an example, the morphemes of the word morphemes are morph which is borrowed from French and it means “forms” and the French suffix -eme is used to describe the basic units of a language. So, knowing the uses of "morph" and "-eme", and within the context of what I am reading, I may be able to understand the meaning of any word containing morph or any word ending in -ene. By learning one word, I may be able to set the stage for many more words to follow.
Anyway, I'll be giving this approach to vocabulary a try. I don't have an eidetic memory; so memorization, for me, is much easier when I can relate the new item to something I already know.
