Summer holiday vocabulary review

For Japanese learners of English

Hi all,

This is a special post for Japanese learners of English. There’s an invitation at the end of the post!

If you’ve been following my articles, you know that I include vocabulary at the end to make it a little easier for you. Since I’ve just published my 50th post (wow!), I thought that it would be interesting to see what kinds of words show up most often in these articles.

I pulled together all of the vocabulary lists, put them into Excel, and figured out which words were used three or more times.

The words in the list below could be put into categories, for example, nouns or verbs or adjectives, etc. They could be put into groups such as words dealing with the environment, human rights, or politics.

I encourage you to use the words in some way. Write your own sentences with some of the words or, even better, write a little story (sample below). Then read your story out loud if possible. When you hear yourself say the words, you send a message to your brain that the words are important. If you make a recording of the story and listen to it once or twice a day, you will remember the words with very little effort. What a great way to learn vocabulary!

Here are the top words. How many do you already know?

5 occurrences:

abuse 虐待

arrest 逮捕

4 occurrences:

dictator 独裁者

humanity 人間性/人類

slave 奴隷

3 occurrences:

bury 埋める

contaminate 汚染する

discrimination 差別

solidarity 連帯

Just for fun, I put the words into chat.openai.com to see what sort of story AI could write. Here’s what it (and I) came up with. I had to edit the story so that it would make sense, but only as an exercise that is meant to help you learn vocabulary, we can use it as an example.

In any case, can you find the words from the list above?

There was a cruel dictator. He arrested people and made them slaves. He also contaminated the land. Humanity suffered abuse and discrimination. Little by little, the people started working together. They felt solidarity with each other. Finally, there was a united effort to take over the dictator. The people won, and he was arrested. After this, the people worked together to clean up the contaminated land. The past was buried, a new era dawned—free from discrimination.

Okay, it’s not well-written, but if you can get the gist (the main idea), that’s enough. Remember there is no test here. ;-)

If you would like to see the total list of vocabulary so far, you can download it (free) here —> https://tinyurl.com/SISV-50

Go ahead and write your own sentences. Leave them in the comments. Let’s see what you can come up with!

Good luck!

And now, for the special invitation!

On Saturday, August 26th, from 9:00~9:40 a.m., I invite you to a short, live, online discussion. This Zoom discussion is open to anyone, but to students and teachers in particular. Please choose one of the songs in an article on Social Issues in Song for us to talk about!

➡︎ Email me at louisehaynes@substack.com by noon on Friday, 25 August, and I will send you the Zoom link. Please do not write your email address in the comments section! I need your email so that I can send you the Zoom link.

Hope to see you there!