Note: If you are really serious about improving your vocabulary, we highly recommend you check out the popular Ultimate Vocabulary Builder

How an Audio Vocabulary Builder Can Save You

If you were one of those kids that read a lot in school, you may understand why an audio vocabulary builder is a good thing. How many people can relate to this situation? You read a word in one of your many books. You read more books, you see it over again, and you start to develop a sense of meaning for the word. You may not be able to give a precise definition, but you know how it should be used. You can even spell it and use it in a sentence. You internalize that word, and it comes up in your thoughts. Then one day you use it in your regular everyday speech, and you discover to your extreme embarrassment that you have mispronounced it horribly.

The word “harbinger” is a good example of this phenomenon. This word means something or someone that foreshadows or otherwise predicts a coming event, and is often used in the phrase “harbinger of doom.” The word comes up in all sorts of fiction, and many people learned it from reading. However, this word is very rarely used in speech. Many people learn the word without ever taking a close look at the spelling, and simply develop their own mental pronunciation. Harbinger is pronounced like “har-been-jer,” but many people who have learned the word through reading pronounce it “hair-bing-er” or even “hair-bring-er”. Not only does the mispronunciation completely ruin the mood set by the phrase “harbinger of doom,” it also seriously embarrasses the person who said it.

Most people with big vocabularies learned all those words by reading, reading, and reading. This is pretty darned effective if you have an entire lifetime to spend lost in a good book. Unfortunately, most adults who want a bigger vocabulary just don’t have that kind of time on their hands. Also, unless you can read the International Phonetic Alphabet, you won’t learn how to properly say a new word even if you look it up. That’s where an audio vocabulary builder comes in handy.

A lot of people are auditory learners. You probably know if you learn better by hearing than by seeing, you may have to read directions out loud in order to really get the hang of something. That’s why an audio vocabulary builder is a great investment, you can hear someone pronounce all the words. Using more than one sense to process a word also helps you learn and remember better. When you hear and see the word at the same time, that’s twice as many ways for your brain to remember it later. Just make sure you get one of those programs that has an actual human saying the words, instead of that wacky text-to-speech voice. Computer pronunciations are kind of hit and miss, you may still end up with that “harbinger” problem.