Here are some SMART ways, all practicable, to improve your vocabulary in English as a language.
I am bound to make your process of learning more vocabulary in English fun and easier than you might have thought. Well, just allow me to introduce you to the deal in about two paragraphs and we’d head straight into my SMART tips.
All right, so I didn’t really plan to tag them SMART, it just turned out that this word can encapsulate the long gist. One other thing to know is that I’m writing you this from a personal vantage point and not research based, because it has worked for me and a number of people that I know. I needed these tips to be SMART yet practicable and help building vocabulary realistic to achieve.
What are the SMART ways?
Study
Memorize
Assimilate
Re-learn
Test
Study
First, the general rule for increasing one’s knowledge of many things, is to read more. But what’s more, you take a closer look; study.
Okay? But there is usually one problem associated with this; you may have read five books and still haven’t mastered as much vocabulary as one who has read only two novels (included in the number you read). The possible problems here include:
You didn’t set your mind to pick new words while reading. (The reason you’re reading counts)
You may simply be doing an extensive reading. (Which unless you’re a writer or smth, won’t usually motivate you to study texts)
Second, it is no magic thing! You have to learn it too. And I would advise you to do it at a slow pace. This was what I learnt sometime in the past when I asked my mentor to put me through the way to build my vocabulary. He recommended that I learn as little as two new words per day.
And while it may sound so weak or poor to begin with, remember that it is better to remember 50 of 60 learned vocabulary words when one needs them than not being able to come up with 20 when one has learned much more in no time. The goal is not to have come across every word in the dictionary!
Trying to master 10+ new words each day for many days straight may not be realistic for most people, for instance, so make it gradual too.
Third, practice makes perfection, as they say. You must consciously use the words you’ve learned or you still may not significantly improve your vocabulary.
Just be determined to do it and work towards it, it’s not so herculean to reach.
Memorize
This shouldn’t sound like some form of cramming, but perhaps more of a conscious process. If you deliberately wish to improve your vocabulary, you may have to remind yourself of the words you’ve learned more often than you’ve ever been doing.
This process shouldn’t be hard to grasp, but I wouldn’t like to dwell on it either, as people have different ways of memorizing things. What matters here is to make sure it gets to your memory too.
Assimilate
This is the stage where you acquaint yourself with the words you have in your brain. This alters the barrier of being far-fetched.
To get to the heart of A in SMART, you should consider the concept of register also. Many of the words you’d be learning are more associated with people of certain groups rather than others.
Consequently, you want to be sure of what field or environment uses your desired kind of words more and acquaint yourself with them. Note that you may also take our ‘Assimilate’ for ‘Association’. The important thing is to get familiar with what you like to know.
Re-learn
If there is anything I have come to crisply understand about the vocabulary building process, it is that one has to constantly learn, re-learn, and sometimes unlearn too.
One bad approach with you may be that you do not take time to compare the different meanings of your new words from different sources.
Sometime ago among my colleagues, I became the only one who knows the full concept of masochism, by chance. As simple as that example may sound to you. They thought it has to do with s£xual contexts alone, while I’d already read extensively about it to know that it gives a stereotypical view of selflessness.
Yes, it happens. We cannot know it all, but if we are curious to know more (including the etymology) of every nice word we come across, we would soon be mini dictionaries as your colleagues may later think a befitting cognomen for you to be.
But haha! Sorry, let me add at this point too that your intention to improve your vocabulary should not be to impress. Basically, you should build your word bank so that you won’t run out of words easily.
Trust
Yo! I understand that my T in SMART may sound rather funny, but I mean what it means. One reason you may have not been constantly using the new words you come across is because you don’t trust your environment to be the best place to use them or you simply do not trust that you’re using them correctly. In either case, I’ve got you covered.
– If your physical environment is a problem and you think there is nothing or very little to do to change circumstances, I would suggest you MIGRATE to the virtual environment here. On the internet, you can join other influencers and post well-written texts about anything on your mind by simply having an account on any social media platform of your choice. An alternative to this is to pick up the writing path.
– As regards whether you’re correct in the usage, you can get yourself a mentor, an English language instructor, or an editor to help you learn from your mistakes, should you make any.
To wrap up, you should be confident enough in yourself to believe that your mistakes are negligible and that they are mere mistakes and not errors since you’d be actively learning.
So, this is the deal in a nutshell: I read more and pay close attention to the wordings of every book I read. I spell out the notably strange words in each of those books and find what they mean. I try to make the words stick to my brain after which I find a way to understand their meanings more and then put them into use. My putting them into use may even come as the third or fourth of the five phases and not necessarily fifth.
The goal is for us to have more words with whose meanings we are familiar, accessible by heart. I’m convinced that our SMART ways to improve your vocabulary in English will contribute meaningfully to your vocabulary building processes.
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