The Background for Good Conversation : Page 103

The habit of exact observation is the best imaginable machine for increasing your vocabulary along with your knowledge. If you have the nose for news, you note the things you do not know. You then ask their name and use. The ease with which one can in this way learn things was brought home to me during my first trip abroad, in Spain, where among other things I wished to learn Spanish. Walking into a market to buy a vegetable I could name, I asked the attendant the name of all the others on her stand. In an astonishingly short time I had learned the names of innumerable objects in this way. I even realized in dismay that I now could name some vegetables in Spanish which I had sometimes seen here in the United States but never learned to name. Every time we note a strange thing and get its name we have added another brick to our conversational structure.