I remember telling a teacher that I didn't think my eldest needed to do spelling every night as he picked up words quickly and she said perhaps I could get him to write synonyms instead.
"They would beat us with bamboo sticks - sometimes until the stick broke - and with their bare hands, which left marks," said Lin, who had picked up words of the Atayal language from classmates as his parents had raised him speaking Japanese.
In summer, kids pick up words like "zoom" and "wow".
I am trying to pick up words, rhymes, lyrics and failing.
Printing scripts on colored paper is big because most copy machines can't pick up words on a dark background.
Searching through your notes is simple, thanks to text-recognition software that not only picks up words you have typed in, but even words that appear in saved photographs.
It is as if you had invented a camera that can take pictures only of red objects, or a microphone that picks up words only if they are spoken in French.
As you make your way through the grammar and the pronunciation you will also pick up words, polish them, turn them over and over until they sit in your hand like smoothly polished stones.
"I would argue that what people are doing is not actually understanding what the author has written but picking up words and phrases," says Andrews. "The more they know already, the greater the degree of that fragmentary information they'll pick up".
