How to learn new vocabulary

How to Learn New Vocabulary!

At some point when learning a new language you are off the deep and and have to face the cold harsh reality that your teachers won’t spoon-feed you with new words and phrases anymore. How we hated those weekly vocab tests in high school, right? Those ridiculous tests for which you had to know thirty sorts of fruits and twenty synonyms for the word insect spray – something the majority of us couldn’t remember two days afterwards. But at least you could absolutely rely on only having to know the relatively manageable list of words in unit X and nothing more.
Well, that’s how it still works in for example Arabic (my second language) at the moment. Your teachers don’t expect you to learn any new words on your own but stick to the vocabulary in the textbook, which is –let’s not deny it- quite pleasant. 

However, we passed this stage in English long ago. Learning English has changed from a petting zoo to a merciless Formula One race – Keep up or get off the track! Unless you stand on your own two feet and move your ass to learn copious quantities of new words on a daily basis at some point you’re out of the running. It’s as simple as that!  

To be honest, up until the famous KGP I never really had a sincere!! strategy for acquiring new vocabulary in English. I was a true-hearted and faithful follower of the “some English books here – a couple of English films there – that should do it”-mentality. Of course I did learn the assigned vocabulary units last year in order to pass the PC’s but all in all my extracurricular attempts to practice my confident use of English and to widen the flamboyant spectrum of my vocabulary were fairly negligible and mainly limited to watching Rowan Atkinson monologues on YouTube. The KGP however was something that in German we would refer to as a “deftige Watschn” (getting one’s ears boxed/ slap upside the head [US]). 

Long story short – I’ve got to find new (and more efficient) vocab learning strategies and I feel tremendously honored to share them here with you:

1. The Read-a-book-then-search-the-pdf-on-the-internet-then-create-a-list-on-vocabulary.com-Strategy:

      I guess that at this point each and every of my fellow readers has read at least one English book. And I also guess that at some point you came across words that you didn’t know. Well, looking up every unknown word –because you are an English student you are prone to doing that kind of stuff- is insanely tedious and therefore demotivating after a while even if you start with good intentions as I did. Before long you notice that you can no longer follow the plot, because you were so occupied looking up single words, and chuck both the book and the dictionary against the wall. Even reading on and ignoring the words wasn’t satisfying for me because somehow I wanted to know them.
 

      However, I found a solution for this problem. I made sure that my book (in this case The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien which was packed with oodles of words I didn’t know) was available as a PDF-file on the internet. Then I opened it and just copied and pasted whole chapters into the list creator of vocabulary.com (you have to click on [Vocabulary Lists] -> [+Create a New List] -> [Enter words: from list]). As if by magic all the words were listed and all I had to do was deciding which words I wanted to have in that list and choose a sample sentence for each one (either from the text itself or I can browse a number of them). Yeah, this takes some time but in the end I had a list with all the fancy words from The Silmarillion and was satisfied. Because now I can learn lots of hyper-archaic and basically completely outdated English words like behold and hearken. Don’t tell me that your girlfriend won’t be impressed when you disrobe in front of her and say “Behold this pulchritudinous body!”. Give it a try!
You want to tell your boyfriend/ husband to stoke up and intensify your sex life but haven’t got the technical vocabulary to explain exactly how? Apply my strategy to Fifty Shades of Grey and there you go! 

However, this strategy does not only work with literature or books. How about applying it to an academic article about WWI? Or just search for academic literature in general (or reliable newspaper articles), paste it into the list creator of vocabulary.com and get the specific vocabulary. I’m sure this will help you preparing for the academic research paper.
       

2. Dictionaries! 

      I know the majority of them are not really that interesting and I suppose you aren’t very fond of reading them either. However, I myself have a hardcover Collins Cobuild Advanced Dictionary, which is completely corpora-based. This means I don’t get dry and dusty definitions jammed between signs and abbreviations that I neither know nor want to know, but instead full sentences in which the term is clearly explained! That way it is –believe it or not- even somehow delightful and compelling to leaf through it. So far I would

sometimes browse it just for fun, you know, when looking up a word and then taking a look at the next word and the next and so on. However, I like this dictionary so I intend to do that on a daily basis from now one, maybe one random page per day, and the next day I’ll skim through the previous page again to see what I remember and continue with a new one. I don’t want to learn it by heart but I guess if I do this often enough, eventually some of the sentence-explanations will get stuck in my head!

          3. Games! 

     

Play English based card games or parlor games with your fellow students. That’s fun and it helps you to improve your vocabulary and since you would generally interact in English during the game or the board game party, it also gives you a chance to practice your everyday use of English. My favourite card game is the extremely hilarious Cards Against Humanity since it is superbly politically incorrect and features an incredible range of vocabulary.

       

      4. Thesaurus.com! 

     This site is just priceless. Don’t just  use it for looking up synonyms for your homework but use the whole website. Take a look at the homepage! There are so many opportunities to improve your vocabulary.