Hey you guys!
This is my second post on how to improve my vocabulary, as an assignment by my English teacher in charge of vocabulary and pronunciation. As I kept my first post on this topic pretty short, I've spend more time on this one. I'll tell you how I take advantage of the web, of blogs from other students and how I cope with acquiring 700 words I will be tested on in about 5 weeks.
Of course, the internet offers an indefinite number of websites related to language and language learning. My problem, though, was that I never knew where to begin my research in this sea of websites. Thanks to my English course, I've already come across many good-quality monolingual dictionaries, news pages, etc. which proof to be very beneficial
Monolingual dictionaries. There is no excuse not to use them and get rid of those bilingual ones! OK, it's not that bad to use bilingual dictionaires once and again, but from experience I can say it is more effective not to. My Top 3 monolingual dictionaries are the Longman Dictionary, Merriam-Webster and The Free Dictionary. I like the Longman and M-W dictionaries because it is easy to navigate on their websites, there are clear definitions of provided and more or less enough sample sentences. This is an important aspect, as the word is used in different contexts which makes easier to understand its meaning. I appreciate The Free Dictionary because I don't know any other dictionary dedicated to this great extend to idioms. By the way, dear reader, you could contribute to my effort in learning new words as well :) As I am still in search of a dictionary providing good collocations, please share your knowledge with me and let me know where I can find one. I would be very grateful!
For several weeks, I've intensified taking advantage of anglo-speaking news, like The Atlantic, The Economist, BBC News, and CNN and. Reading the news has become almost as relaxing as to browse through the local newspaper when having breakfast. The small difference is that you don't enjoy the usual buttered bread but words. A great diet, I can tell you and either way, your breakfast comes with a cup of coffee ;-) But frankly speaking, it is somehow pleasant to find a word you're about to learn in an interesting article. It makes it so much easier to remember it thanks to the context! Now that's learning by doing :) By looking at some fellow students' blogs, I became motivated to write words that are hard for me to remember on post-its (idea taken from Alissa). I will put them in places I often pass by to force myself to learn them. Another way to acquire a new word is to research of its word family (seen in Sohpie's blog). Although thi requires a lot of time, I can well imagine that this will have a positive effect on me expanding my vocab. In Marlene's blog, I read about SKeLL, the Sketch Engine for Language Learnin, which is a corpus for British English. Although I opt for American English, I believe it's useful in several cases. The corpus is easy to handle and doesn't overwhelm you with information, which some others do.
To learn the words we will be tested on in January, I gathered some colleagues in order to create a glossary together. Writing down the definitions, synonyms, antonyms and sample sentences of 700 words is just too much to do the work alone. As soon as the glossary will be finished, I will mark all the words with (for a German speaker) a difficult pronunciation. Other than that, I might add some pictures I can associate the words with to remember them better. To support my learning process, I'll do the exercises in the Porter book, as if I'm not mistaken, all of the words are used from this book.
With the help of these strategies, I am optimistic and I will do my best to take the exam well-prepared.
Have a nice day!
Bye for now :)
The pictures are not mine, I've taken them from
https://fbcdn-profile-a.akamaihd.net/hprofile-ak-xfa1/v/t1.0-1/p160x160/528550_10150712204063308_54187003_n.jpg oh=6af64c48c917845a6ff72df808b1972a&oe=54E5A1B1&__gda__=1427379246_296ec762d190918a0ce793e94e14cf14
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDw5PtsgATdNbgulkpP7H-SzGa7P7P3qJftbvwNeERe-Uxi05dRZ-N_8ORAc7YRuIwpqO7UcAXv4bVNnKH1SH9_KA-35XwzxbNlmi_NHSLH2i_sw0VPhfi0v__sFpHIbzQbTRevSZrKKQ/s400/The+Atlantic+Magazine.jpg
http://kathywelton.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/14255682-teamwork-and-strategy-concept-in-word-tag-cloud.jpg
Hi Kati! Awesome post :) I liked some of your strategies, especially the one with word families, because they're not that obvious and not everyone thinks immediately about them when he or she starts learning new vocabulary, I'll definitely give them a shot myself too. I also like that you're having fun with the whole TED experience - some of these talks are the bomb, and that you're getting your news from a wide variety of sources, which not only means that you're improving your vocabulary, you're also getting a more or less objective view of the world :)
AntwortenLöschen