The process of learning any language is one of growth and evolution, where things learned at the beginning of the study program form the basis for things learned later. When you’re working on English vocabulary improvement, you might be tempted to start at the top, with the biggest, fanciest words you can find, learning those and trying to work them into your conversations. While that might work sometimes, you may feel more confident about using your new vocabulary if you have a firmer foundation to build on.

If you’re using the Ultimate Vocabulary software, you’ll appreciate the Word Discover™ feature that sorts words by their levels of difficulty. Because vocabulary study is a cumulative process, learning the lower-level words will give you a good overview of the shared word roots and characteristics that will help you learn, understand, and correctly use the more difficult and less common words at the higher levels.

Every word you learn will be of benefit to you, but it’s a fact that you’ll end up having the opportunity to use some words more often than others. It’s only practical in a general English vocabulary improvement project to devote more time – at least at first – to learning a larger number of more general words that you’ll use more often than in spending your study hours only looking at the most difficult and specific vocabulary words which you might only rarely have occasion to use in conversation.

One of the primary goals of a good vocabulary improvement course is to raise the overall quality and quantity of your vocabulary, so that your presentations and conversations as a whole become more polished, adept, and refined. In general, you’ll make more of an impression on people if you can consistently speak well on a variety of subjects, rather than being the person who occasionally comes up with a unique (and possible unknown to the rest of the group) vocabulary word.

Here’s a metaphor for you: if a chef at a fancy restaurant served you a bowl of plain, unsalted mashed potatoes, but added a gold-leaf-sprinkled cube of foie gras on top, would you consider that a gourmet meal, or would you just think it was odd? Having a working vocabulary that’s at the plain-mashed-potato level and inserting the occasional “fifty-dollar word” may give people the same impression. Now, there’s nothing wrong with mashed potatoes! They’re a nutritious and inexpensive meal. But think about all the things you can add: salt, butter, chopped fresh herbs, some grated aged parmesan cheese, shaved black truffles – you can see we’re working our way up to that cube of foie gras, but gradually, so that it will seem an enhancement rather than an out-of-place item. Work on your vocabulary in the same way, so that you can offer people a dish of top-quality, deliciously descriptive words at every conversational meal.