How to learn new words properly

[صراح بوشارب]

Vocabulary is realy important for speaking, writing, reading and listening so start developing from now on. The more words you know the more you can express your ideas in detail when writing and speaking and clearly understand when listening and reading. Well if you want to improve your vocabulary you have to learn new words everyday. To learn new words you have to read English news papers or books everyday. Learning 10 words a day is enough or at least 5 if that too much for you. If you do it for a year you will get to know 3650 words and thats a lot of words. Ok here is how to learn new words properly. You need a separate note book for this. When you read the news paper or the book take down the words that you cant understand. After collecting 10 words(or what ever amount you comfortable with) you can stop reading or you can continue reading but dont take down any more words. Now take your dictionary and look for the meaning of the new words. Write down the meanings in front of each word. Now you should study the 10 words by heart till it absorbs to your mind. Next you should write down a simple sentence for each and every new word that you learnd so that you can learn how to and when to use that word and get more familiar with the new word. See the following example


Abduct – Kidnap
The dacoits abducted many women from the nearby villages.


Remember a one word can have several meanings and can have different usages so be aware of that. If you can you should write down several sentences for the word which has several meanings and learn the different usage of that word. Another thing is that you can learn the meaning of new words using your mother language and it is not a must to learn the meaning of a word in English. You can learn the meaning using any language that you are comfortable with. Take your note book where ever you go and study the words that you forgot. Try to use your new words in day to day life as much as you can when you are speaking and writing. This might be hard for you but if you realy want to improve your English you should work hard because there is no easy way or short cut to success.


Good Luck!


Please post your methods and ideas that you use to improve your vocabulary so that others can learn different methods and choose the most effective one

[معتصم الحارث الضوّي]

Dear Sarah,
This is a great contribution. However, I disagree with you on one point, viz.
Writing out ONLY the words to look them up in a dictioanry. I believe you should write them out in their original context i.e. in the context found in the newspaper you were reading. For, at this stage, and being a non-native speaker of english -or any language, for that matter- you should not come up with your own sentences as you might use them incorrectly
Regards

[ضحى القره غولي]

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Dear Sir,
The best method for learning vocabulary, in my opinion, is through context. Memorizing long lists of words and their meaning in Arabic is not a good way of learning. I advice learners to read authentic material such as short stories, news articles, advertisements, dialogues, and try to guess the meaning of new words through the context without resorting to a dictionary until they finish the piece they are reading. Then they can check the meaning of these new words in the dictionary and write them down in their notebooks. Finally, I'd like to say that the most effective way for increasing one's vocabulary repertoire is by extensive reading: read, read and read

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