English Fluency: You are learning Vocabulary the Wrong Way!

English Fluency: You are learning Vocabulary the Wrong Way!

Most of the people are culprit of doing searches like “List of most common vocabulary”, “List of 1000 English words” etc. but I’d like to tell you that you have been doing it the wrong way whole time. Memorizing vocabulary for fluency is wrong way.

A Native English speaker knows around 20,000 vocabulary and even more. To be fluent, you require a solid 10,000 words vocabulary. Now, most of the people will do searches like lists of vocabulary which is wrong.

See, when you memorize vocabulary, you don’t know when or where to use the word. If you also learn its usage, there’s a high chance of you forgetting it. Eventually, your mind won’t be able to put those words in flow, and when you’re speaking you can’t use those words. Now, for some people it might work but mostly it wouldn’t. So in this article, you’ll be learning some great tips about really expanding the vocabulary!

With grammar, vocabulary also has a very big contribution in fluency! When you have a massive vocabulary, the chances of getting stuck while speaking would be a lot less because you have a lot of synonyms for a single word.

Well besides forgetting when you have a big range of fluency you would be able to handle formal conversations as well. Nowadays, learning English is an investment and doing that investment would be a great choice.

Well, the conversation should be as simple as possible because even you will learn some hard words but your surrounding people won’t, they’d just like to stick with those old words they have been using all the time. So you will have to use simple words. But if you’re having conversation with native speakers or having a formal conversation, that would help a lot.

Those arduous words can be back stage workers that would help you when needed. Now, first you’d have to learn synonyms of mostly used words. Like the synonym of happy could be ecstatic. This is just one example. So you should start by learning the synonyms of the most commonly used words. That’d be easier as well as convenient.

Now, a question arises, How to Learn Vocabulary? As in the beginning of this article you have seen that trying to memorize vocabulary from lists is the wrong way. Let’s have a look on the real way!

For some people memorizing could be helpful but as said before ‘not always’. Because when you’re memorizing words, your brain couldn’t replace the old words with the new ones easily. You might forget those words soon. And most probably your mind wouldn’t just put it in the flow. So learning the use would also be crucial.

So the first and one of the most important tips would be to immerse yourself in the language. Your environment has a big impact on you. You’re most likely to learn what is in your environment, so it would be very convenient to immerse yourself in the language you’re learning.

And if it is not possible to change your outer environment, you can change your inner environment like switching your thinking language into English from your native language.

Try to speak to yourself in English. Try to interact with English speakers.

Now Social Media, in this time almost everything is available there and there’s a once in a blue moon chance of you not using it! So try to watch as much English content as possible.

Try to watch English Movies, read novels, and most important is to read books. Reading books wouldn’t only help you increase your vocabulary but it would also help you to learn morals and adopt good habits. Now you can read books at any time, especially before sleeping. Instead of wasting the 2 hours on screen time, you can read a book or something.

It will be your choice that which book would you read, doesn’t matter if it’s fictional or non-fictional, just read.

Then, here comes a problem that you just can’t keep a dictionary with you and keep translating words after every sentence.

Who said you do it?

Just think that when you were a kid and you just used to observe the environment and people speaking around you, how many times did you use to open the dictionary or the translator?

So, simply keep reading. Mostly, when you read a sentence, you’re most likely to guess what the word is by the context. Context is the wordthat come before and after a specific word, it simply is the situation in which a word is used. So you have a brain, and that is useful… believe me!

Sometimes when you’re reading and a new word pops up, you can guess what the word is by just seeing where the word is being used or how is it being used.

Then Spaced Repetitions are also very useful. It means that if the word comes again and again while reading or watching something, you will just learn it. It’s like for the first time the words is an alien for you then it becomes familiar and then you’re comfortable to use it! So when you hear a word multiple times with some spaces in it, you’ll learn it!

Then when you’re free, try to watch movies, stand up comedies etc. Isn’t it relieving that your brain will do all the work? In fact you’ll be enjoying more! Your life will have more entertainment! And hope you won’t be embarrassed while talking about a movie with in your friends for not watching it.

So gradually, your brain will adopt the new words and will replace it with the old words and will put it in the flow, and when you’ll speak the new word in flow, you’ll definitely be happy “I spoke this?!” could be the possible reaction!

Then keeping a journal would also be great! Just writing how your day went using the new words you learnt in the day would also help you remember the words. Even writing some lines everyday would be ok!

Read new words and also use it or lose it, it’s a great principle.

Even though it might still take years, it is the process of years but the progress of even one month would be enough to stay be motivated. It’s just like you go the gym and you have started getting biceps, it is a long process but you’re gradually progressing. Now I think that should be enough motivation to keep going, same goes here!

So these were some tips we learned throughout the article and by implementing them, you can increase the pace of learning vocabulary and move faster on the to fluency!