An old forgotten habit
Last week I was standing in the study (room) of my late grandfather. Standing there is always an adventure. There are hundreds, if not thousands of books in his study. Maybe a common habit by professors, maybe not. I don’t know.
So I took a chair and looked at all these book titles, like in the old days in my childhood. This was something I always did, if I wanted to distract myself from the whole world. It’s was like a kind of magic, the world stood still and at the same time the time ran as crazy.
And there was it, a small red notebook.
My name was written on it. It was a hand writing of a child. This child was me and I had no idea what I wrote in this book in those days.
I was curious about it and turned the front page over to see the first page. And then I remembered.
I was about ten years old and my vocabulary in German was quite bad. I used to talk a lot with my grandfather in those days. But I used the same kind of words over and over again which was pain in my grandfather’s ear. So the very next day, he took me straight away to the biggest bookshop in Zurich. This bookshop has over six floors and an endless choice of books. This was for me as a small child a very special experience, I think that must have been the feelings Harry Potter had at the moment he entered Diagon Alley the first time. (For those who don’t remember the first part of Harry Potter anymore, Diagon Alley is a cobblestoned wizarding alley and shopping area located in London, England behind a pub called the Leaky Cauldron.)
It was just amazing to see all these books. My late grandfather told me I could choose any book I like and in case I have to decide between two books, I shouldn’t bother and just take both of them.
There was only one condition. Which was, whenever I read a word which I didn’t understand, I had to highlight it and after I finished the chapter I had to write it down into this red book down. After I wrote it down I had to search for the meaning of that word in one of the dictionaries he had in his office. I wrote the meaning of it beside the word itself and an example sentence on how it was used. Beside all of that, my grandfather corrected the grammar mistakes and wrote his notes in it as well.
My writing skills increased enormously after a few months and I had it much easier in the school when I had to write an essay.
After remembering all of this I took an empty notebook and started to do the same think with my English books. So currently there’s still a lot of new words to discover, but hopefully I will improve as good as I did in German. I can highly recommend it to you, to do it as well. You might only learn one word per day, but imagine after 365 days…
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Jason
