I found this book in my Kindle on the subway to work this morning. And remembered that I downloaded it free from the Kindle store years ago. For some reasons, maybe my English was not good enough to read it, I haven’t read it yet. After read a little, I think it’s prefect for me for now.

The reasons is:

  1. With Kindle, it provides some tooltips over the new words, so I can read it without a barrier.
  2. Also it provided me some new words to remember, as I don’t like to remember new words one by one from some apps, which I will never use them and then forget them.
  3. I found some audios from archive.org, so I can listen to it how to pronounce the new words.

The steps I read this book should be:

  1. Read it on my Kindle, mark some words to remember.
  2. Listen to the audios, and read again.
  3. Take notes with my own words.

CHAPTER I: REQUIREMENTS OF SPEECH

Only about 2,000 Words Are Required

  • The key of master English is knowing where to place them, that also let us master how to speak and write correctly.
  • Use simple words as possible as you can, because great scholars and writers and polite do so.
  • Simple words made your speech or the things you write easy to understand.

Nine Great Classes of Words

Article - Only two: a or an and the.

Noun - Proper and Common. The most important.

Nouns are varied by:

  • Person - First(I), Second(You), Third(She,He,It)
  • Number - Singular(单数) and Plural(复数)
  • Gender - two sexes, but four genders
    • masculine（男性） - male kind
    • feminine（女性）- female kind
    • neuter（无性） - inanimate things or whatever is without life
    • common（中性） - indeterminable, such as fish, mouse, bird, etc.
  • Case
    • Nominative - I,You,He,She
    • Possessive - My,Your,His,Her
    • Objective - Me,You,Him,Her

Adjective - A word which qualifies a noun.

Pronoun（代词）

Three kinds of pronouns:

  • personal I,Thou,He,She,It(We, You, They)
  • relative
  • adjective

Verb - signifies action or the doing of something.

Adverb (Adjust Verb) - modifies a verb, an adjective and sometimes another adverb.

Preposition - connect words and to show the relation between the objects.

Conjunction - join words, phrases, clauses and sentences together.

Interjection（感叹词）- expresses surprise or some sudden emotion of the mind.

THREE ESSENTIALS

  • Purity（纯正） - precludes the use of:
    • all slang(俚语) words
    • vulgar(粗鲁) phrases
    • obsolete terms
    • foreign idioms
    • ambiguous expressions
    • or any ungrammatical(不合语法) language.
  • Perspicuity（清晰）- clearest expression.
  • Precision（精准）- concise(精准) and exact expression. Neither too long nor too short.