Building your English vocabulary can seem daunting when there are so many words you don’t know. Feel like you’ll never get there? Here are some tips to help you boost your word power.
Learn by doing! The body learns faster than the brain! It’s true: when we do something, we learn faster than by watching or hearing it. Don’t just look and listen for new words. Use them! Speak them. Write them down. Read them. Practice every new word that you learn over and over again, until it’s not something you remember – it’s something you know
Seek and you shall find! Be active in trying to discover new words. If you come across something you don’t know the English word for, find out what it is! Look it up on the Internet or in a dictionary, then write it down in a notebook. Your vocabulary will grow every day.
Play a game! Playing word games is a great way to expand your vocabulary. If you know the answers ?awesome! If you don’t – even better! You’ve just learned a new word, so you can’t lose. Try word games like crossword puzzles, Scrabble and Hangman.
It’s your cue! Pasting cue cards (pieces of paper used to write down a word or phrase) on objects in your kitchen, your bedroom, and your bathroom is a great way to learn new words. In fact, it’s impossible not to remember these words if you are looking at them all the time!
Make use of multimedia. Watch English movies and try to catch all the words. If you hear a word you don’t know, write it down. Highlight new words you come across in newspapers. Learn the words to your favorite songs. Make learning English fun, rather than tedious.
Take a guess! You can often guess a word’s meaning using context. What were the other words in the sentence? Try to make a picture in your mind. If someone says, “I saw a movie at the cinema,” and you don’t know the word ‘cinema,’ guess what it means. You’ll be surprised how often you will guess correctly!
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