ESL Blogs

Grammar and vocabulary are friends of the people with untiring effort; they tend to continue practicing English without slowing down or stopping, which explains why they are so good at English. They've understood English isn't just about learning grammar and vocabulary, it's about practicing grammar and vocabulary. Would you like to be friends with grammar and vocabulary too? If your answer is “yes”, then get ready to play with it too.

What is grammar?

Any language has its own set of structural rules which control the composition of words, punctuation, phrases and clauses; we call that, 'grammar'.

What is vocabulary?

This term defines the number of English words, that are familiar to a certain person. Therefore, vocabulary differs from person to person and it develops with the usage not with time.

Now you know what does “grammar and vocabulary” mean. Knowledge of grammar and vocabulary help us to clearly express our ideas to listeners and readers. Obviously, it's a fact that memorizing is harder than learning. We can easily learn all the grammar rules and a lot of words within a month; the problems is “How to memorize them all?”. Let me be honest with you, You won't be able to memorize all of them in a short period, even native English teachers make mistakes, so it requires commitment than natural talents. Most learners face this problem, but If you're willing to practice, you'll be able to improve your grammar and vocabulary. With that being said, I'd like to share some methodologies to remember grammar and vocabulary.

Vocabulary

Just think about your own mother tongue for a moment. Do you remember your childhood? You'd never used all the words that you know at the moment. You've learned them by listening, asking, understanding and using new words throughout your life; matter of fact, you still find new words from your own mother tongue, don't you? Same goes with the English language. At the very beginning we tried to memorize the alphabet, then tried to assemble words from those letters, after that we tried to make sentences using those words with the help of grammar.

It seems like we should learn all the words prior to grammar rules. But it's not like that. We suppose to learn and practice words and grammar at the same time to consolidate, otherwise we will easily forget either vocabulary or grammar.

Learn 5 words per day with meaning and how to pronounce them correctly, write them on a piece of paper or on your arm; then just try to make simple sentences using those words, make sure you personalize those sentences, sentences should relate to your experience, expectations or things that you know very well, that way you can easily remember the words when in need. I hope you know the saying “friend in need is a friend indeed”. A sentence may contain one or more words of those 5 words. End of the day you will definitely remember those 5 words; it is easy to remember sentences than individual words. The advantage of this method is, we don't have to remember the meaning of the word, the sentence will define the meaning of the word and we can easily imitate and apply those sentences when we're writing or speaking.

I use www.myvoc.net to remember my vocabulary, I've designed that system for my classmates; but if you really want to memorize words, you may use it as long as you want; it's free and easy to use. All you got to do is, regularly visit that website and put new words. It'll show your vocabulary, with example sentences and how to pronounce words; each time you visit the website, try to fill blanks while making your own sentences. In fact, I've got 3 new words written on my arm at the moment, I'm sure I'll find 2 or more new words today; end of the day I'm going to put all those words in to my www.myvoc.net account, that way I will never forget those words.

There are few aspects of a word, spelling, how to pronounce it, origin, related phrases, the stress, intonation, related prepositions or is it a preposition it self, collocations going with that word, is there related compound words, derivatives, synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, irregular verbs, superlatives, comparatives, does it have a related noun, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, etc.

I know it sounds hard and complicated, but that's the reality. The Roman empire wasn't built in a day my friend. If you learn 5 words per day you will learn 1825 words in a year. Try to use those 5 words in the chat room, if they're not familiar with those words, define those words with example sentences. That will reduce your burden for sure. Because teaching is the best method of improving memory.

Once our teacher was absent and some other teacher came for the lesson, his name was 'Mr. Grant', and he was from England. On that day he taught us 'future perfect tense' and he told us that we have to learn by hard at least most common irregular verbs(there were 104 common irregular verbs in our course book, there are more than 600 irregular verbs in English). Then I told him, “oh, there are a lot of irregular verbs(104) and I'm afraid I can't remember them all”. Guess what he asked me! He asked me “Can you remember 1 irregular verb for a day?(base form, past tense, past participle)”, I replied “Yes, of course”, then he asked me “There are 365 days for a year, how many irregular verbs will you able to remember for a year?”, I told him “that's 365 irregular verbs. I like the way you think sir, and I'll try”. When you have a problem, try to break it down to several pieces; that will reduce the complexity of the question and it'll definitely facilitate the solution.

Learn how to use a monolingual dictionary; I personally recommend Cambridge or Oxford dictionaries. That said, You can easily install a dictionary on your mobile phone or use www.oxforddictionaries.com. Those methods will help you to improve pronunciation as well, but I advise you to get use to the phonemic chart, that will help you to properly pronounce words. Let me tell you how to remember sounds of phonemic chart; download a high resolution phonemic chart and take an A3 size printout, laminate it and put it on your bedroom wall, try to memorize 2 sounds per day before you're going to bed; when you wake up, the first thing that you should see is that phonemic chart on your wall, and try to sound all the known sounds in that chart. There are 26 letters in English alphabet, but there are 44 sounds in the phonemic chart. If you can remember 2 sounds per day, it'll take only 22 days to learn all the sounds in English language, that's less than a month my friend. I've done it, I've memorized 2 sounds of the phonemic chart at a time. This is my phonemic chart, it's bigger than you see in this picture(A3 = A4+A4); I can easily read the symbols in this chart, while I'm lying in my bed. If you feel awkward or ridiculous, don't do it.

If you follow that, you'll be able to properly pronounce words in dictionaries, if you seeor  mark, that means you should stress that section, that's the main stress section; If you see  or  mark, that's the secondary stress section of the word or phrase.

Url to phonemic chart

http://www.englishclub.com/pronunciation/phonemic-chart.htm

Url to phonemic chart app 1

https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/phonemic-chart

Url to phonemic chart app 2

http://www.britishcouncil.org/parents-help-pronunciation.htm

Url to phonemic chart app 3

http://www.englishclub.com/pronunciation/phonemic-chart-ia.htm

Once you get used to this chart, you'll love reading dictionaries. You need some sort of motivation to do all these things otherwise you'll feel bored and stop practicing English. I mean everybody likes interesting and curious things right? Try to translate sounds(words) in to text using phonemic chart and compare your translation with the dictionary, you can translate your mother tongue's words as well; come on, it'll be fun! Anyways, You're not going to lose anything by trying these things.

Homonyms(homophones), these are confusing words which sound alike but have different meanings. Sometimes it's hard to differentiate these words as well, So how to overcome this problem.

Let's take a simple example.

eg. sea, see

I know this is too easy for you, but this is just to understand the structure, then you can deal with words like complement and compliment, elude and allude, discreet and discrete, etc.

sea and see, first word ends with 'a' second word ends with 'e', so how to memorize these words and spelling? We can do this by creating sentences.

When preparing the sentence, add words which start with confusing letters, you should use the same pattern to all the sentences, that way you will easily remember the correct spelling of homophones and other difficult words.

“Sea is amazing!” by memorizing this sentence, we can easily know, this is the word that ends with an “a”.

“See you tomorrow everyone!” by memorizing this sentence, we can easily know, this is the word that ends with an “e”.

The more you read and listen; the more you learn and remember new words.

Grammar

In my opinion this is the hardest part of the language. We should always start with the easiest grammar rules and apply them on daily basis to consolidate them. As an example let's say you've just learned 'simple past tense', status or actions which are started and finished in the past and it's not continuing in the present.

eg.

+

subject + past tense of the verb

I/you/he/she/it/we/they swam

I/you/he/she/it/we/they ran

-

subject + didn't + base form of the verb(so called verb root or infinitive* )

I/you/he/she/it/we/they didn't swim

I/you/he/she/it/we/they didn't run

?

Did + subject + base form of the verb

Did I/you/he/she/it/we/they swim?

Did I/you/he/she/it/we/they run?

Always use time lines to remember the tenses.

[there are so many aspects of past tense to cover, but I'm not going to discuss them all in this article.]

Now, to consolidate the grammar rule, you should take a piece of paper and start writing sentences, or chat with people about your past life, make sentences and speak out loud.

Graded readers will help you to improve your grammar knowledge; If you know your level in English, you can easily find a graded reader on internet.

Find someone who's willing to practice with you. There are so many members who are looking for partners, both of you can separately search a certain grammar rule and then you can share what you've found and learned. There are a lot of online resources to improve grammar, English Club itself gives enough resources to improve grammar. I personally recommend you to join this group http://my.englishclub.com/group/grammarly-yours to improve your grammar. It provides you well organized grammar lessons followed by quizzes. You will definitely appreciate those grammar lessons.

Always think about grammar rules and look for opportunities to use them as much as you can, that way you'll get used to grammar rules pretty soon. Listen to songs, radio or watch movies; Meanwhile, try to find the grammar rules in it. Organize the information that you are studying, put it in different folders if you have to and don't listen to naysayers and don't be afraid to make mistakes, more mistakes mean more experience, try to learn from your mistakes; Believe me, it's easy to remember your mistakes then correct ones.

If you feel like overwhelmed by this article, then that's good. That means you know that you have areas in English that you can or should improve. Have you ever met someone who's been to an English speaking country, at least for a year? They usually speak well, even though they don't have a clue about grammar rules and all that, they've learned by listening and practically using the language.

If you follow these advices, you will soon realize that you have enough words in your vocabulary to make grammatically correct sentences; There are no shortcuts, only practice can make you better. Good luck with your grammar and vocabulary. Thank you very much!

Kosala Siribaddana

Enjoy your reward!