BEST WAY TO LEARN VOCABULARY - PART I Happy Monday everyone! I hope everyone had a great weekend and a good start of the week. In todays post, Id like to share with you a method of learning vocabulary that Ive been using for a long time now and find extremely effective. Ive decided to divide the post into two parts with part 1 focusing on how I came up with the method and part 2 elaborating how the method works. So, it all went back to the time when I was in 6th grade. I was taking an English class, and the textbook that we used came with a booklet that contained all the key words from the textbook. The words were organized into lessons and each word was followed with an abbreviation that indicated whether it was a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb, or a preposition, etc, plus its translation into my first language. Wasnt it nice to have all the words that you need to learn well-organized into one place? At least I thought so. Everyday, I learned the words by writing them and their translations over and over again. I even made sure that I wrote the words in the order that they appeared in the booklet. I was such a nerd, wasnt I? Every now and then, for a change, I just wrote the English words and challenged myself to remember their translations, or I wrote the translations and tried to remember the English words. Over time, I wanted to learn additional words that I picked up here and there, so I made my own notebook of new words. However, the way I learned the new words was pretty much the same. I just kept writing words again and again. Honestly, even now I still cant understand why I could do that and never got bored. I quite enjoyed it and was very proud of myself when I could remember the spelling and meaning of all the words in the booklet, which was quite a lot, mind you. My learning of vocabulary took on a slightly different approach once my English in general improved and my vocabulary exapanded. I still kept a notebook, but no longer wrote the translations. I could still remember the meaning of the words though. I did write the words repeadtedly a few times to remember the spelling, but the amount of rewriting was nowhere near what it used to be. The first time I noticed something wrong with my way of learning vocabulary was when I was in college. I realized that the translations did not always reflect the true meaning of the words and that I couldnt explain the meaning of a word in English since I only know the translations. Besides, remembering the translations alone prevented me from recognizing the links among many words that are similar in meaning. To fix that, I got myself an English-English dictionary, in which words meaning is explained using English. As a result, my vocabulary improved both quantity-wise and quality-wise. So, with the purchase of an English-English dictionary, was my search for the best method to learn vocabulary over? Not at all. I encountered a new problem. Even though I knew a lot of words, and I could understand texts very well, I usually failed to use the words I knew when I was speaking or writing, or I used them in the wrong way. Somehow the words were not there when I needed them. I knew that they were stored somewhere in my memory, but they were just not there, ready to be retrieved. The problem, I figured out, was English words typically have multiple meanings and meaning is context-specific. Its not enough to just know the meanings. You must also know the context in which the word is used and the meaning derived from that context. That way, not only are you aware of the subtle difference in various meanings of the words, but you are also more likely to be able to use the words yourself when the same or a similar context is present. With this important discovery, I decided to give my learning vocabulary an overhaul. I still kept a vocabulary notebook, but this time I did not write isolated words any more. Instead, I wrote down the entire sentence or phrase that a word came in. The sentence and phrase is the context that helps me know what meaning the word carries and also how the word is used. To put the word in the larger context that it came in that helps make its meaning even clearer, I sometimes wrote down the source of the sentence or phrase such as a movie, a book, an article, or someones speech, etc, but I could usually remembered that without having to write it down. You may be thinking that writing down sentences and phrases is time-consuming and laborious, but trust me, it is not. The benefits, however, are huge. One big benefit is the chance of you using the words yourself is very high. Let me tell you why. Because the word comes in a phrase or sentence, it is in a ready-to-use form, so you can easily retrieve them when a similar context presents itself. Another important benefit is it truly expand what you can learn. Ill clarify this point for you. Vocabulary does not consist of individual words alone. It could be phrases or ways of expressing ideas that you can not learn by just applying grammar or putting together isolated words (Ill give examples in part 2). By learning words in sentences and phrases like this, youll learn much more that you could never do otherwise. With this method of learning vocabulary, all I did was I went over the sentences and phrases while paying attention to the key words every now and then by saying them either silently or out loud again and again with the purpose of making the words and their contexts stick to my memory. It should be pointed out though that this method of writing down the context of the words were made possible thanks to the development of technology, hence the availability of authentic materials through the internet, cable tv, and globalisation. Thats it for part one. In part two, Ill show you in detail how you can apply this method of learning vocabulary yourself and see your English improve.
Posted on: Mon, 10 Nov 2014 18:47:03 +0000
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