Having a large vocabulary is not just for people like writers and intellectuals and each one of us should do all that we can to maximize our vocabulary and ensure that we have as many words in our head as possible. Naturally this also does help the writers among us and the legendary writer Roger Wolfson often cites the work which he did during his uni days on increasing his vocabulary as a reason why he feels so comfortable writing about any subject.
So now that you have left school and college, what are the tools which you need in order to give your vocabulary a much needed boost? Well there are in fact many little tricks which you can try out, all very simple and all of which will help you to amass a broader and deeper vocabulary.
Just Ten
My advice would be to look at learning just 10 words per day, that’s it, just 10. The best way to do this is to pick 60 words at the beginning of the week, or even on the Sunday prior, and then split them into 6 groups of ten, each day learn the words and on the final day you can put them together. I would recommend picking 10 words which start off with a different letter to avoid confusion and the most important point here is not just repetition of those words, but also trying to get them into a written or a spoken sentence.
Final Day
On the final day of the week it is time to test yourself by writing out as many of the 60 words as you can on a piece of paper, with a quick description of their meaning. Once you have done this, compare it with the original list of words and see how many you were able to get right. When you have the list of those which you missed, move them onto next week’s list and add new words to make it up to 60.
End of Month
Learning a word for a week is one thing but to really get it stuck in your memory you are going to have to give it a little more attention than that which is why the end of the month should be an exercise in going over the full 240 words which you have learned, once again, any you cannot remember, add them too the following list and continue like that until you have truly learned them.
Phone
I find that using a phone is a great way to keep learning and all you need to do is take snaps of each word and meaning, and then just have a quick scroll through a couple of times per day. Repetition is the father of learning as they say and that is why it makes sense to keep those words handy and push to try and learn as many as you possibly can.
Do this and I can assure you that your vocal will be more abundant by the day.
2018 ·