1100 Words You Need to Know

This book is amazing. You learn five new words a day and an idiom. For each set of 5 words there are two exercises. The first of which gives you the gist of the meaning by looking at how the word is used in a given context. In the second, you match the meaning with the word. After every 4 days there is a review section. A very practical approach to building vocabulary.

Echoing the other reviews this book sticks to the task of giving a few words every day in the context of a short piece taken from a wide range of source types. My slight reservations are around the US authorship (and a lot is -ize instead of -ise to explain to my kids).

Having now got this I realise it is aimed at reasonably advance KS3 readers (and indeed adults, there being many words I now find out I don't quite use correctly).

This book teaches everyday five words with their usage and one idiom. At the back there are answers to exercises. highly recommended.

Vocabulary building can be quite boring, hence it is easy to forget the meaning of new words learnt, but this book makes vocabulary building enjoyable. Not only are you giving words and meanings, you are also given excercises to do on a daily bases this structure helps to retain knowledge, so that each day you are looking forward to the next excercise knowing that you are not doing too little or too much.

Words learnt in one excercise also appear in the following excercise and this makes one become accustomed to the word...I would recommend this book anyday!

The method used in this book is the best technique I have ever seen. Each word is used in context, and you are encouraged to guess the meaning. Then you review the meaning using a matching test and a fill in the blank test. It is a stroke of brilliance that the words you have already learned are continually reviewed by being used over and over again in the following chapters. Each week has 4 lessons plus a review lesson, and a different storyline is used each week. These stories are of high interest and very clever. It is hard to put this book down; I have to restrain myself from going on to the next page! My only regret is that I didn't have this book 20 years ago!