VOCABULARY LEARNING STRATEGIES

(Or Sometimes Sharpies Are Not Enough)

Not that I could afford sharpies, mind you; they’re way too expensive in Europe, and if I had them, I certainly wouldn’t be using them to help me learn vocabulary. No, I’ve been forced to find other ways.

Before I start talking about those ways, I should probably mention what learning a new word means to me. I used to believe, once upon a time in grammar school, that knowing a word meant knowing its most common translation, and that was it. Well, maybe the preposition that went with it.  Oh, the ignorance.

The process of learning new vocabulary looks somewhat different these days. The first step is probably finding the words to learn. That sounds obvious, but really, you can’t just open a dictionary and start from the beginning. I think a student’s book can be a good starting point—but only a starting point.

Say I find a word in there that I don’t know yet and I decide, yes, this one could be useful, let’s go learn it. I would go looking for a definition in a dictionary first. My personal favourite is oxforddictionaries.com because it provides more examples than some other dictionaries and there is a thesaurus on the same site. I used to rely on bilingual dictionaries; now I rarely go near them at all.

I’d check the pronunciation next, mostly relying on dictionaries, but sometimes YouTube can prove useful (try learning how to pronounce words like neonicotinoids… This one happens to be in Oxford Dictionary, but many of the words from my brother’s thesis weren’t…).

The next step would be learning how to use the word in a sentence and its most common collocations. (Or all of them if I didn’t know what to do with my time.) Once again, dictionaries (my teacher says learner’s dictionaries, but I’m really not a fan of them, so I refuse to change this in the post) prove useful with the corpora-based examples they provide. Unfortunately, those few examples can only do so much, so that would be a good time to open a corpus or two. Not that I’m a fan of them (in some corpora I couldn’t even figure out where to type the words in), but COCA is still quite useful since you can specifically search for collocation. It’s also a good place to look for the subtle differences between synonyms. Antimoon.com/ce can come in handy as well, but I find that you already need to have an idea what you’re looking for. It’s good for checking if one word collocates with the other, but not really for finding collocations if you’ve never seen the word before.

Knowing in what kind of register a word appears is also important. Corpora might be useful in determining that, and if I’m not mistaken, dictionaries often tell you whether a word is colloquial or formal as well.

Now, this is all great, but there is one more thing that’s essential, namely remembering all that information. There is no recipe for that, seeing as how different methods work for different people. My personal favourite are just plain old notes. Well, maybe not plain. This is where those sharpies I mentioned before would come in. I love to use colour and doodle on my notes because it makes remembering a word or a phrase so much easier. Of course it probably won’t work for somebody who’s not a visual learner. Repeating the words out loud might, though, or—my personal favourite—trying to explain or list the phrases you’re working on to your disinterested roommate. It’s even better if you can actually force them to listen to you.

Other than that, I’d recommend reading, reading, and some more reading, but I wouldn’t underestimate the habit of excessively quoting movies (*cough* Marvel *cough*) or watching series, either; certain words often appear in a certain context, and the brain probably does its magic, connecting the words with the contexts. And the more ridiculous the context, the better.