Remember that time when you read an article but didn’t quite understand it? We often use context as our guide when we meet unfamiliar words. A profound vocabulary improves textual understanding and provides ample ways to express yourself.
Knowing how to communicate eloquently can have a tremendous impact. It allows the sharing of ideas and thoughts with others, such as reading a book, watching a movie, talking with friends.
My Personal Story
My reason for expanding my vocabulary was the SAT. I have been living abroad for 15 years, and sadly, My English hasn’t improved as much over the years. Opening the SAT English test for the first time was a mortifying experience. I vigorously scavenged any available source on how to improve my vocabulary. The following list encompasses three highly effective ways I found to improve my vocabulary.
“Foreign research on vocabulary learning strategies started in the 1960s, at first research focuses on the study of individual, by studying the learner’s behavior to observe their effect the change of learning a language. It was later discovered that successful language learners were not necessarily positively correlated with their intelligence, but rather with their own efforts and mastery of learning strategies.”
(“An Analysis of English Vocabulary Learning Strategies” by Zhihong Bai, Shanxi Normal University, Linfen, China).
As you can see, successfully building your vocabulary depends on using the correct strategies.
Vocabulary.com
(I am not affiliated in any way with Vocabulary.com)
Many platforms teach vocabulary, but in my opinion, the pinnacle is Vocabulary.com. Vocabulary.com is an online website that perfected the process of learning new words. When you start, Vocabulary.com asks you questions to find out the current capacity of your vocabulary. After analyzing your level, they will create mini-games for you to play, each time questioning you with ten different words. As you answer more questions, you gain progress on that word, and once you reach 100%, you mastered it.
My method to use Vocabulary.com was to meticulously go over every word I didn’t know and add it to my list. I set a goal to finish ten games a day (I now have over a million points). I would read the definition at least once and add it to my list for every unrecognized word I noticed. After each round, I would go over each word five times and say the definitions out loud to further enhance my memory.
The explanations on Vocabulary.com are top-notch, every word is accompanied by hundreds of sentences in which it was used in. (A web scraper collects sentences from the news). You even get statistics about how many times you may encounter the word in written text.
Each word also has synonyms and antonyms to help you build a word-map. (A word map is an association between words in your mind that helps you recall similar words).
There is a specialized list for you whether you are learning for the SAT or struggling with a new book. I mostly used the SAT lists, but now I use lists specific to books I am reading.
Understanding that mastering a word takes time, so you are tested on each word on multiple sessions spanning multiple days. Why so long? Because they want to make sure that you know every commonly used definition of the word. Also, they give you a little time to forget in between, so that they can make sure that you are retaining the knowledge you learned.
Repetition
A general misconception is that you can learn hundreds of words in a short period. I strongly object to this idea. In my opinion, constant repetition spread out for a long period is the perfect way to retain as many words as possible. Letting yourself forget a word and then relearning it help you to remember the word. Cramping for 10 hours on 50 words won’t be effective. You will probably forget most of them in the following week.
“significant gains in receptive lexical knowledge can be observed after as little as one exposure whereas the development of productive lexical knowledge requires a minimum of three encounters and increases significantly after seven occurrences.”
Webb, Stuart. (2007). The Effects of Repetition on Vocabulary Knowledge. Applied Linguistics. 28. 10.1093/applin/aml048.
My suggestion is that if you know that you have to learn words for a specific event (SAT for example), then you should try to spread out your studies instead of cramping before the test. For example, 1 hour a day for 5 months instead of 5 hours a day for 1 month.
Images
The saying “A picture is worth a thousand words” is particularly true regarding many words. There are words that no amount of verbal explanation can describe, and thus I advocate for incorporating images in your studies.
Let’s take the word “awning,” for example. Here is the definition by Vocabulary.com:
Now you probably have a good understanding of the word, but let’s further incorporate it:
The combination of the verbal meaning of a word and its image can solidify the idea. Triggering different parts of your brain is a great approach to learn anything, especially vocabulary.
My suggestion is to search for images of confusing words. Maybe even keep a document linking between words and their corresponding images.
Conclusion
The tools demonstrated above can help you have immense success in learning new words. I hope you will try them out and build your formula, creating a strategy that works for you. Best of luck!
