In the first vocabulary post, I mainly focused on my ideal vocabulary learning strategy. Which, you know, is all well and good, but sadly I often don't have time or energy for everything I should do in order to really master new words. So what I want to focus on today are little tricks I found in other people's posts that could help me make vocabulary learning more time efficient, and some ways that aren't really ideal but can still be useful.
Part I: "Borrowed Ideas"
- Sticky notes. I saw this idea here and here, and I saw it in use before. I know an American who's married to a Slovene woman, so he's trying to learn Slovene. They have sticky notes all over their apartment, and I suppose if you see a note that says hladilnik every time you open the fridge, it's eventually going to stick (pun not intended). I know this is an example of somebody who can already speak English, but I'm sure sticky notes are useful for learning any language.
- Modern technology vs paper and pen. Excel (here) can be a lifesaver sometimes. Well, more like a time-saver. It's certainly less time consuming to create a table with all the synonyms, collocations, and whatnot with a computer than writing everything by hand. But there are still some people who prefer to write things down (this is also connected to sticky notes, so see the second link above). I would be one of them. Not just because some connections are supposed to appear in the brain when people write things by hand, but also because using the computer for notes makes everything so... uniformed. It's so hard to create an interesting, dynamic layout, whereas I can just write things wherever I want and however I want when using pens and paper. (I can also doodle, which is always a plus.) It turns out making notes with a computer can take more time if you want to produce the same results. (I'm not sure when this stopped being a piece of advice and turned into a discussion about the pros and cons of electronic and hand-written notes, but I hope it can still stimulate some minds into thinking about the dilemma.)
- COCA has a setting that enables you to look at academic sources only (idea came from here). Not sure why I haven't noticed this before, but it could really help me save some time. For example, if I had to find out how to use a certain word in an academic context (if it's appropriate at all), I wouldn't have to go through a million example sentences just to see which of them are taken from academic papers first. See? Saving time.
- Differences in British and American English (here). I admit, this is not a tip that can help you save time. If anything, it will make your research last longer, but it could also save your ass on the exam. (Trust me, I'm speaking from experience.) It is smart to know whether Brits or Americans use a specific word or not, or if they pronounce it differently.
- And as a bonus: I really liked the comparison between words and people here. It's a new way of looking at things, and that's always good.
Part II: Less Efficient Strategies That Might Be More Fun
This is where I stop being smart and talk about the ways I actually learnt English words. It was fairly simple, really: I read and I wrote.
I was in my first year of high school, I think, when I finally dared to pick up an English book and enjoy it. I'd just found a really great series called House of Night (though I admit I stopped buying the books over the years and still haven't read all of them) and I ran out of translated books. Desperate times call for desperate measures, right? Right. I bought an English paperback. And I inhaled it, just like many other books that followed.
I've always been the kind of person who has books everywhere. Bookmarks, not so much. I'd use slips of paper, or postcard, or whatever I came across. The good thing about that was that those pieces of paper always had some blank space for me to write on, so I started keeping a pen nearby while I read, and whenever I came across an unknown word that seemed useful (maybe it was important for the understanding of the story, or it kept reappearing), I'd scribble it down. Slowly but surely, I got a whole list of words, and I remembered most of them without really trying.
The writing part demanded more effort on my part. Long story short: I ran out of fanfictions to read, so I decided to write one of my own. Since I can hardly publish something Slovene online and expect people to read it, I was forced to write in English. And you can't "cheat" when you're writing. You can't guess the meaning of a word from the context like you can do with reading. It doesn't work that way. Which is why dictionaries become your best friend, and it only escalates from there.
So there. I hope this is at least a little bit helpful. Happy holidays, everyone. ^^
~s
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