Min. Av. Max. vocab building

ayprof

April 26, 2010, 11:21 PM posted in General Discussion

Hello, lurking for a long time, thought I'd pop my head up and add something.

So, I was a reading of a pretty interesting technique to help build understanding of different "families" of words using degrees of distinctions.  Using a dictionary to do this is pretty tedious (and probably not accurate as far as actual usage), so I thought I'd throw a post up and see if people wanted to contribute (I say this not yet having a contribution...yes, I know, lame).

The idea is to add words in an array of degrees of intensity, approval, disapproval, weight, or any other characteristic using the "minimum," "average," and "maximum" of that group or family.  A few examples might be (in English):

creek, stream, river

pebble, rock, boulder

big, huge, gargantuan

dislike, hate, detest

pink, red, scarlet,

etc.

I'll try to add some some more later (in Chinese, of course).

What about it?  Know any?