I was asked to write a couple of words about the strategy that I use to expand my vocabulary. Well, the ways of learning are very simple:
- First of all, I try to highlight all unfamiliar words in the texts I read. Provided you follow this way, there is one good tip that must be very useful: the context is a key point in any text you look through, you’d better guess the meaning of all highlighted words firstly, and then, of course, look them up in the dictionary. The best result you get if you use an English-English dictionary. Despite an explanation might be unclear, try to guess again, or just use another English-English dictionary; sooner or later you will find the best one for you.
- The second way is to listen to English native speakers’ speech as mush as possible. The more you are interested in information people are talking about, the more effective this method will be (by the way, I believe that the effectiveness of all these techniques depends on your desire to understand new stuff). The day before yesterday I found one good radio station that I recommend to listen to online; there is idle talk about life in London and it could be entertaining.
- The third strategy is writing. I understand that you can’t help smiling at the moment you’re reading this post ;) I started to write on different topics in November, my first attempts were terrible. It seemed that I wrote everything wrong, each sentence was in doubt. Six months later, I may say that I can produce a text of four hundred words and make only 5 mistakes in it :) Practice, practice, practice, even if you believe that the writing pieces are very silly. While you are writing, you absorb new words because you want to diversify sentences which have almost identical meaning.
- Finally, I am going to say a few words about speaking. This way is the most hard to accept. It does depend on the listening skills and the fast pace of the conversation might baffled you. On the other hand, if you need to speak English and don’t have another opportunity to get somewhere or to fight with circumstances, you will take in every word.
The problem is that it’s hard to find a partner who will help you to develop your current skills and handle a conversation for your good.
Say, that the knowledge of the culture of the English-speaking world and the most connected with this thing idioms and sayings, makes you be sure about exact meaning of a sentence. You live and learn.
I covered the most obvious points of widening vocabulary. Hope, that some tricks will be helpful. The main idea of this topic is that drilling new words in almost all cases is the useless thing because words you’ve got this way are not corresponded to real situations.