How To Improve English Speakin - Vocabulary Learning Tricks

It is not uncommon for people nowadays to wonder about methods and strategies on how to improve their English speaking, and vocabulary building tips are not the in the least demand of them.

What you want to know about vocabulary building is that no matter what method you choose, you will still have to go through the words several times, because, in my experience, there are not many people that can memorize the words on their first try and forever.

Despite this pessimistic beginning, I do however want to present you with some strategies that at least proved to work for me Personally. I am familiar with a lot of them, those including treasure hunting, making stories out of unfamiliar words, but I just don’t feel like talking about them, so bear with me.

My first method of choice – brute force learning with a word list.

So simple, and so efficient! Basically, what you do is that you just write down words into a list (or download a word list – a GRE word list,for example) and then you just toil through it like a university student studying a subject that he has no interest in. So funny!

Anyway,  except for the fact that this pretty much all you need to know about the strategy I do want to add some other things that you might consider doing in order to elevate the efficiency of learning and that is to use the Excel program.

The reason I advise you to use Excel is because it is probably the most common text editor (so it means you probably have it on your computer), but aside from that I also just wanted to emphasize the point of using a software in general (any software that is capable of what Excel does will suffice), in contrast to using a pen and stock of papers, for example. The reason to it is that the data will be presented in a more organized way and you will be able to edit and sort it later, if the desire so arises.

Second – use mnemonics

Mnemonics are just tricks that help your brain to associate the words with some other entities (pictures, for example). But in my article I want to propose you an idea of grouping the words that have a similar meaning together under one label. What this accomplishes is that the words that are harder to remember will be associated with the words that are easier to remember. You can view the structure you build as a thesaurus of some sort, except that you can group words that are not complete synonyms and that you probably don’t really care about including everything under every category – just enough to learn the words you need to learn.

If you encounter the word “expedite” you might want to put them under the label of “fast”. Yes one is a verb and another one is an adjective, but if the link makes enough sense to you then it is good. Remember that you do it for yourself, so whatever works is good.

And I recommend you using an Excel file for this task as well.

Is using a vocabulary building software efficient?

This is also worthy of notice – software. Basically, you can download free software from Internet and they come in the form of quizzes, tests or games.

They are pretty efficient, but most of them don’t allow you as much latitude of grouping and marking data. For example, you might want to mark the words you encounter with the labels of “words I know for sure”, “words I’m not sure about” and “words that are total Japanese to me”, so if you can find a program that does allow you this feature then I would go for it.

Also one of the advantages of this method is that even when you are drowsy and half-asleep, you brain will still learn the words to some extent as long as you continue clicking your mouse and looking at the monitor.

Ciao!