The Room of Acquirement* “Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?" asked Mrs. Dodypol. "It depends," says I, "how much you used the dictionary before you read it.” ― Alexander Theroux , Darconville’s Cat Let's face it, learning new vocabulary is a pain in the neck for many of us. You have to develop your own vocabulary retention capabilities, besides those that your language teacher -- because this isn't just an issue in English -- provides you with. Thinking back to our Anglo-Saxon linguistic ancestors , we realize that as a Germanic language and like nearly all of the other Germanic languages , verbs ended in /-en/ just as they do in modern German ( a second cousin ) , D utch (a first cousin) and Frisian (a double cousin or just about), and were highly inflected . The Anglo-Saxons ruled England just after the Romans pulled out in the 5th centur y until (officially) 1066 with the Norman