Since my student years I have always wondered what’s the most effective or useful way of learning words (memorizing as many words as possible ) in any target language. I have always been in search of those ways , by saying ‘’always’’ I mean since-the years-of-my-high –school. Those years were the first time when I realized the importance of learning the English language and that was when I took up English more seriously with one aim to apply to the Institute of Foreign Languages or The State University .Why I’m saying all this to you , because I want to highlight the seriousness of my goal to learn the English Language not only as a means of communication but also as a future profession.
Some words can be guessed from the context, that’s what I have been doing for years when I was reading any book in original, first of all I decide if that word is worth learning or looking it up in the dictionary, if I come across that word more than once than it IS worth learning or checking up its meaning. Sometimes a whole sentence may depend from a single word , then for sure I take no time and start searching for its meaning, or definition or even some more meanings to find the exact one which I need.
Most people find that it's useful to organise the vocabulary they write down in some way, either to break the words/phrases into groups for learning, to show relationships between similar words, or to make it easier to find a particular word. Here are some ways of classifying your vocabulary that you might consider: according to alphabetical order; the order in which you found the words; topics; situations; 'families' of similar word meanings; frequency of occurrence or level of difficulty
Some others think that ‘’There is no other correct way to organize your vocabulary notebook or exercise-book (or wherever you keep your words , may it be a file in your PC or in your laptop or Ipad or Iphone , anywhere!)’’
As for me it is a good idea to think about possible ways of doing so.Here are some examples of organizing your vocabulary such as a tree-diagram, or a word-tree, words forks, bubble-networks or a cluster or mind-maps or spiders diagram or whatever you may call it . I will try to give you some examples here.
When I’m giving private lessons , I mean when the learners group is made up of rather grown-ups, I suggest the beginners to learn the new words by dividing them into particular topic.
Comments
Hello Bianca
Thank you for your useful blog .
It is what I do with my children in class .
Bye Bye
Hmmm .. I never seriously organised any new vocabularies that I've encountered. Maybe because I'm the most disorganised person in the whole wide world. LOL. Once, centuries ago, when I started to take interest in English language, I did write down certain words that I don't understand in a notebook. But I found it to be useless, in my case, because I tended to forget all about it. Therefore, I just decided to put them in the corner of my mind, and try to remember them. The only way that I found to be effective in learning new vocabularies is reading, and reading and reading.
Very good elaboration. In my opinion learning or memorizing words of a foreign language (say English), the learner should try to use such words repeatedly in writing or while speaking (whenever requires). Just to compile them in a note book is not so effective, because for this purpose there are dictionaries and thesaurus.