How I improve my vocabulary!

When studying languages, it’s very important to keep adding new words to your vocabulary and study them efficiently. For me, was practically impossible to study vocabulary and actually remember it for a long time. That was until I started working with an awesome website called vocabulary.com.

 

For me, the best way to study vocabulary used to be to write it down and read it out loud. If I see and hear a word, it’s easier for me to remember it. But just writing down the word without learning its definition doesn’t really make any sense because you won’t know what it means and in which context it is commonly used. Thank goodness for vocabulary.com. I absolutely love this site, users can do so much with words. You can make your own lists and then take little “quizzes”, where, four synonyms are shown and you have to pick the correct one. Sometimes, there will be a short paragraph with a missing word. You have to type in the word correctly after listening to it, which means you are studying its pronunciation and how it’s written at the same time, which is very helpful. Whenever you make the right choice or type in the correct word, you get points. The more points you get, the higher your ranking in the high score is, where people from all over the world compete against each other. People like me find this motivating. Vocabulary.com can also be used as a regular online dictionary, featuring not only definitions but also great example sentences taken containing that word from up-to-date articles on the web.

Another awesome thing about this website is that you can clearly see which words you have “mastered”, and which are not yet perfectly clear to you. You can earn badges/achievements (see the screenshot for examples), which you can collect and brag about to your friends and classmates. Learning vocabulary this way is in fact very motivating and productive.

What I wouldn’t recommend (based on my personal experience) is studying from a book or just repeating vocabulary lists until you are blue in the face. The words are harder to remember that way and in most cases you still won’t really understand in which context each particular word is used. It’s also hard to remember anything you have learned from a list after a while, whereas you can always repeat the little tests on vocabulary.com, which is much more entertaining and useful for you. Best of all, like I mentioned before, you can create your own vocabulary lists with selected words from, for example, vocabulary lists you have to study for the next exam, or just new words you encounter while reading a book or while researching for your paper! 

In my opinion, using vocabulary.com is absolutely the best way to learn and understand new words. I remember words for a much longer time after “mastering” them and if I don’t know a word I can just look it up on the same website which instantly provides great definitions and plenty of example sentences. Such well-designed tools make the whole learning process much easier and a fun experience, not exhausting like studying from a book. Through interactive exercises, you actually get to do something with the new words and don’t have to learn them by heart as you would do with a list. I highly recommend this website to any English learner. In my eyes, there is no better way of learning vocabulary!