The present study investigated the effects of two types of core-image-based basic verb learning approaches: the learner-centered and the teacher-centered approaches. The learner-centered approach was an activity in which participants found semantic relationships among several definitions of each basic target verb through a picture-elucidated card game. By contrast, the teacher-centered approach involved explicit instruction from the teacher explaining how several definitions of the basic target verbs are interrelated. A total of 241 Japanese EFL (English as a foreign language) junior high school students acted as participants in this comparative study to determine the superior approach. At the end of the treatment period, a short questionnaire was distributed. A two-way repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed that the learner-centered approach was more effective than the teacher-centered approach with regard to both retention rates for learned definitions and accuracy rates for novel definitions of the basic target verbs. The results of paired t-tests for the questionnaire also support these findings. Considering the results, it can be argued that basic verbs may be best taught through a learner-centered collaborative approach, with conventional teacher-centered explicit instruction as a supplement.