The purpose of this book

Mastering vocabulary tends to be an underestimated skill in learning a foreign language. From the first stages in learning a new language we are aware that it has unfamiliar sounds which we have to pronounce reasonably accurately if we are to make ourselves understood, and the grammatical structures can immediately present us with quite unfamiliar concepts – like noun gender, which is found in nearly all European and many non-European languages, but not in English. However, especially at the outset, we often think of vocabulary mainly in terms of simply learning the foreign equivalents for familiar terms like clock, cook, live or street, because we tend to assume that there is a one-to-one correspondence in terms of meaning between the words of the foreign language and the words of our own.

However, just as each language has its own individual set of sounds, and its own individual grammar, so the structure of its vocabulary, too, is unique. It is not just that the words are different, but they reflect a different perspective on the world. Each language gives meaning to the world by dividing up the things, events and ideas in it in different ways through its vocabulary, categorizing them in other terms and drawing different distinctions.