Yesterday, a friend of mine sent me a link to a New York Times article written by Stanley Fish on the Power of Passive Campaigning. Being a nonnative speaker and not born to the Christian culture, I found a number of the terms and references Dr. Fish used unfamiliar. So I tried to learn the definition of these words through my usual method: highlight the word, copy it, open Answers.com, and paste the word into the search field. However, this time when I highlighted a word, a little question mark icon showed up at the upper right corner. Out of curiosity, I clicked on the icon, and guess what I found—a pop-up window with an Answers.com page giving me everything I wanted to know about the word! A closer look at the header of the pop-up window told me that this was a New York Times reference search powered by Answers.com. The word “powered” is used very appropriately here, because the function did serve to empower this online newspaper by offering users like me an easy way to access the meaning of every single word in an article.
Answers.com is an online dictionary, encyclopedia, and much more. While visitors usually come to the site to find the meaning of a word, one can always find much more. The site offers visitors a whole spectrum of meanings, examples, related Wikipedia pages, and references.
As a first generation immigrant to the United States, I came to the country at age twenty-four. To make up that twenty-four years’ absence of both culture and language, I have to absorb like a sponge every piece of linguistic, cultural, and historical information in my daily surroundings, from Winnie the Pooh to the Keating Five. In this journey of language, culture, and knowledge acquisition, a tool like Answers.com provides me with a vehicle to ride on, and it makes this trip fun and safe.
Why safe? Because it saves me from any embarrassing language clashes. Like most English-as-a-second-language people, I learned most English words by reading them in books without hearing them pronounced. For those words, especially the odd-looking ones, I would not dare to speak them until I’ve checked with one of my native-speaker friends. And that friend, now, is Answers.com, who gives me the pronunciation of every word. I know some other online dictionaries, such as Merriam Webster, have an audio file attached to the word as well, but Answers.com also gives you the translation of the word in multiple languages. So if I’m really not getting a clue from the English explanation, I can always scroll down to check its Chinese translation as a last resort.
While writing this blog, I found some exciting new tools on Answers.com, and they’re free! One of them is a download called 1-Click AnswersTM. Once it is installed in your computer, you can Alt-click (click while holding the Alt key) any word in any program to get an AnswerTip, which is a short version of the Answers page; and if that doesn’t satisfy you, you can click “Read More” to get the full Answers.com entry. So if the publishers of the site you are reading have not become as thoughtful as New York Times, you can download 1-Click AnswersTM.
Many publishers—blog masters and Web masters—are becoming more sensible to the needs of readers like me. WordPress.org, for example, has added AnswersLink as a plug-in to allow blogger to link a word to Answers.com by simply clicking the AnswersLink button on the tool bar.
Research has shown that it takes 5 to 16 encounters for one to truly master a word. And how many words are in the English language? According to WikiAnswers, there are 171,476. Even if you only need a quarter of that for daily communication, we are still talking about 42, 869 words or 214,345 to 685,604 encounters for someone who didn’t get the words through any natural context as a native speaker. But even for native speakers, acquisition of vocabularies remains a learning task from kindergarten through adulthood. And this task becomes more demanding for any discipline that has specialized vocabularies for its own field, such as biology and physiology. So even by simplifying some of the encounters from multiple steps of copying and pasting to one-click access (I guess we can forget about flipping through the dictionaries now), thoughtful technology like 1-click Answers is making a big a contribution to boosting the efficacy of learning.
