Hello and welcome to this English Vocabulary Learning article. There are a lot of difficulties non-natives meet when they are trying to improve their vocabulary. We will try to go through the most common problems in this article, including the myths about “the fastest ways” to learn new words and other points.
If you want to communicate in a language well it is crucial to have a strong Grammar vocabulary. If your lexicon is limited you will have trouble expressing your ideas. If you lack knowledge about more advanced words you will be stuck to primitive sentences and if you lack the basic words you will have trouble with the simplest conversations. So let’s dig into a few concepts.
The vocabulary a person uses and the vocabulary a person doesn’t use
If you want to learn how to communicate in daily life you don’t need to learn GRE vocabulary list. This list is more about outdated or rarely used words that are useful only in high academic environments maybe.
See, people have two kind of vocabularies – active and passive. An active vocabulary storage is a set of words a person uses on daily basis, while passive vocabulary implies words that a person knows about but doesn’t use as much or even at all. So if your goal is just to be able to converse well with native speakers don’t bother too much with more sophisticated vocabulary – talk to the natives and get the lexicon that they are constantly using – these will be more than enough.
On the other hand, don’t expect to become an English expert practicing through these means alone. See, if you are learning English from playing World of Warcraft you will become disappointed when you apply to college and won’t be able to recognize more than half of the words you see there. Internet slang-heavy discussions is not necessarily a good source of learning English speaking. Instead, you want to start reading more books – the higher level they are the better. Consider trying books on scientific topics or books of deep thinkers – you will find plenty of vocabulary there.
There is no permanent memorization method except for repetition
Yes, there are probably methods that are more efficient to you particularly, but even they require consistent hard work from your part.
It has been widely established that a person can memorize the new words only through being exposed to them at least 5 times on average. That means that you probably don’t want to try to cram all the new information in one hour, for example. Let the brain rest after the first iteration and then when you are ready and sharp – go for the next iteration and see if you memorized the words correctly. Repeat the process a few times (remember – an average amount of exposure iterations is usually 5)
Also you should lower expectations of yourself. You are not stupid if you forget all the words. It is just that the human’s brain is constructed that way, so give yourself a break.
There is probably no quick fix.
Yes, go on English learning forums and ask for the advice on how to learn English the fastest possible way. Then get disappointed.
Unfortunately, all the people I’ve asked have been able to improve the vocabulary only through hardcore toiling. Personally, I’ve tried many methods – software, English Speaking going through the list, quizzes, mnemonics, etc. Some might sound like a quick fix, but in fact none of these are better than the others.
There is one factor that will make any method work to their maximum efficiency – one hundred percent focus on the learning process and relentless consistent action with repeating the learning of previously seen words. Also – don’t jump from one method to another – it is useless.