Building vocabulary II

After reading through my classmates' blog posts about vocabulary building, I noticed that the majority of them are far more organized than I am. This is why I decided to postpone my intonation blog post and get into building academic vocabulary again.

In my last vocab post, I tested some android apps which could be useful when you already have a list of academic words to learn. But - what if you don't (have a list of about 700 words to study for an exam in January)?

The main source of academic words are books and articles. When I say books, I don't mean neither science fiction youth literature nor cookbooks or something in-between. Reading academic papers, articles from, for instance, The Economist, The New Yorker or Aeon and other scientifically relevant and high quality texts will enhance your vocabulary. That is why I decided to read one article of one of the just mentioned magazines per week, sitting down with paper and pencil and selecting the words that I am not entirely familiar with. Of course, it is essential that you decide to read something that really interests you, otherwise you won't pay enough attention.

The same with videos. Lying down on the couch with a bowl of popcorn, the lights turned off so that you cannot take any notes and watching a series, a movie or a random English video, preferably with subtitles so that it's not too exhausting, will not help with your vocabulary building. TED is a site that I would recommend if you prefer watching a video rather than reading an article. The TED talks are of academic value, the topics are complex, the content is more substantial than the one of ordinary TV series and the videos are short enough to be able to concentrate from start to finish. Again, write down all the unknown words. Then, the next and most important step follows.

Check the words in various monolingual dictionaries and corpora, for example the Cambridge Learner's Dictionary, Merriam Webster, vocabulary.com or/and COCA, and find out about their meaning, synonyms, antonyms, word roots and families, collocations, connotations, pronunciation, example sentences and so on. You only own a word if you can use it appropriately when writing and speaking. The meaning is surely important, I don't have to tell you more about that. Synonyms are helpful, no actually necessary, when writing a text or giving speech so that you don't repeat yourself. Antonyms serve for the better understanding of the word and additionally widen your vocabulary. Word roots and families, prefixes and suffixes are extremely useful because you can establish relationships between words and then correctly guess the meaning of an unknown word rightaway. When it comes to academic writing, Latin words and roots are especially useful because they frequently appear in scientific papers, substituting colloquial or neutral English formulations. Looking up collocations and example sentences is helpful because you have to know how a word is used correctly in a sentence, which words go with it and which don't. In my opinion, this is the hardest part of studying vocab because sometimes English collocations simply don't make any sense to me as a German native speaker. Connotations seem to be less important but they are not. Every word has its own connotation in a particular culture, so the same word can be appropriate in one language and culture whereas it offends people in a certain way in another

When you are finished finding out more about each word, create a list with all the information and simply study this list, for example, with one of the apps I suggested.

The problem is that most of the words you study will immediately settle in your passive vocabulary but you can't remember them when it comes to speaking or writing, i.e. using your active vocabulary. It is important that you use as many of the new learned words as often as possible when communicating in English. Speak to yourself, to a friend, even to somebody who doesn't want to speak with you, in English, and you will soon notice an improvement in your speaking skills. Owning a word in speech makes it much easier for you to then use it when writing academic texts.

P.S. An informative blog I found on academic vocabulary building and writing.