I was studying law in 2012 and I toyed with a number of learning aids including mind maps and flash cards. Nothing really worked, and I ended up sticking posters on my bedroom wall with the cases written on them. As there were thousands of cases, finally every available square inch was covered with hand written scrawls about common law cases.
I graduated in 2012 and during the same period I was a trainee teacher (in Physics - my original undergraduate subject). During my teaching in two schools I was introduced to the well established Visual-Audio-Kinesthetic learning methods which focused on games, interaction, and different modes of providing information and learning materials.
As events showed I only completed about 2/3 of my teaching training, but I had still learned a lot.
Ever since my early twenties, I was interested in commanding language and also linguistics, but I found it unbelievably hard to find out about linguistics and also to get language references.
As the Internet has blossomed into an enormous resource (90% of all data was created in the last two years), I discovered Google Books to be invaluable. I had already seen the amazon one pence books from my law study.
I was by chance looking at youtube and I saw a channel called easyvocab and it was getting a lot of interest (1500 subscribers in a few months).
I brought together my teaching experience, interest in words, access to Google Books, and the one pence amazon books into one idea to teach words. I started with rare words and then expanded the concept to include unusual or powerful word.
I discovered two things very quickly: one was that many of the esoteric words were not very complicated at all and learning them was very easy, and also that when communicating (especially in writing) the use of a few powerful words changed the reaction I received.
People seemed to respect communication if a few more illuminating words were included.
Once I started to use Goanimate to write the cartoons, I produced about 200 cartoons in 4 weeks, and the whole list started to get unmanageable. Also, I started to see I needed refreshers for some words myself which were new to me. I was originally focusing on new words to my own knowledge.
So I deliberated the question, and finally decided to start wordsuit.com. That is where I am now, and I have just embarked upon the task of producing the website. I am mulling over the notion of linking to all the word videos on youtube as they all seem very popular (except mine which has zero subscribers and I think about 6 views aside from my own).
I have found since I started this task (about four weeks ago) that my mind can so easily grasp new concepts. Words seem to be the transport mechanism for communication. I had previously thought in terms of concepts and facts, but when I study words the mode of thinking I adopt is seeing how the writer himself connected to something. This is a different perspective. If I say for example, the car is blue, it is a constative statement, it is lifeless, it tells me a fact and has nothing indicating the view of the writer. But if I say the car was a sky blue colour it relates a colour to a sense of universality as the sky itself is in everyday lives and we see it everyday; it is also above our heads and completely encompassing.
Actually, I just googled sky blue in google books and got returned 734,000 entries - one is here
Sky Blue
