[口语] Core Fluency Thesaurus by Kev Nair 2005

There’s another important feature you can notice about this book. All the headwords are verbs. Yes, verbs — and not nouns, adjectives or adverbs. You know, grammatically speaking, speech and writing happen in ‘clauses’ (or abbreviated clauses). And the verb element is the soul of a clause — its heart, that which makes it exist and go. And it’s the verb element that gives life to the other clause elements. And it’s when they work in combination with verbs that the roles of nouns and adverbs (and even of adjectives) come alive. And so I’d like you to be clear about this: Just try and achieve a good mastery of the core verbs, and a major part of your fluency problem would be over.

And remember this: A verb (or for that matter, any other word) stands for an idea — in fact, for as many ideas as it has senses. And a good mastery of a verb includes a mastery of these word groups: Word groups (formed by words other than that verb) that can be used in speech or writing as paraphrases or near-paraphrases of the various senses of that verb.