When I started reading the American Heritage Dictionary 4th Ed. two years ago,

the goal was to try to retain as many words as possible. I would copy one page a 

day, record the interesting entries, and go through them over and over until I

know all of them. It was the exact method that I used acing the GRE 25 years ago.

With the dictionary, it didn't work, as I soon found out. The problem was that I

loved almost every new word and even more every old word with meanings new to

me. I even loved the apt examples, many of them quotations, hoping someday 

similar sentences can come out of my mouth. The effort to absorb all the

information soon fizzled. For a while, I sank into a gloom in the wake of the

immensity of the task and was at a loss of what exactly I was trying to achieve.

As I persisted in reading, however, there came a revelation: the goal, if there

is one, is not a feat but continued education. The idea came when I realized

that recently words came much more readily in writing and conversations. That is,

although I could not recall the meaning of every word as I initially planned, I

was making progress somehwere else.

I tried to copy every entry on a page regardless of how I felt about it. I

could have skipped "Grand Chaco," e.g. Its definition is not particularly

entertaining and I probably will never visit the place.

    Grand Chaco: A lowland plain of central South America divided among

    Paraguay, Bolivia, and Argentina. The arid plain is largely uninhabited.

In copying these 21 words, I misspelled two: Paragway and uninhibited. Mistakes

are valuable information and fixing them refreshes and reinforces memory. As

long as I practice this simple copying, the understanding of anything I pay

attention to, e.g., tense, mood, part, number, articles, usage, or even

punctuation, is repeatedly corrected, refined, or confirmed by my almost

infallible teacher. What I got myself into was the best education for free.

My routine has changed since. One page a day becomes one hour a day. Previously,

I often kept music or even video on to fight boredom and I constantly looked

forward to the end of the page. Nowadays, I am no longer bored and need no

distractions. One hour sometimes vanishes in front of the dictionary without me

noticing. As I also constantly adjust breathing and posture, it begins to

resemble jogging up Mission Peak.

I heard that the alchemists, in their doomed quest for converting base metals

into gold, discovered instead things more valuable which led to modern

chemistry. It sounds like what I have been going through with the dictionary.