As I’ve mentioned in my blogpost about vocabulary
learning strategies, words are the basic components of every language. Therefore,
if you want to learn a language, you will not get around studying lots and lots
of vocabulary.
Since I have decided to study English and Spanish at
the University of Graz, I constantly have to be on top of studying new words in
order to pass my exams and of course to improve my language skills in both
languages.
In January I have a massive vocabulary exam for
English class for which I have to learn more than 700 words. Of course not all
of them are going to be completely new to me, but there are some that I’ve
never heard of before. Many of those words have more than one meaning and I
have to make sure that I am aware of all the different meanings. A great number
of the words that I will be tested on in January I’ve heard or read before and
I understand what they mean but I don’t really know how to use them correctly
within a sentence. This is something that I definitely have to work on because
knowing the meaning of a word doesn’t help you as long as you don’t know how to
use it within a sentence structure.
When facing such a large number of words you need to
have some kind of strategy because without any form of organization you will
most likely not be able to learn all of the words in time. Thankfully our teacher provides a list
of all the words on vocabulary.com for us, so we have all the vocabulary that
we need to know for the exam listed in one place.
Now, here is my strategy to learn 700 words in less
than a month. The first thing I will do is to skim
trough the list and create three lists of my own. The first list will contain
all the words that I have never heard of before and that I don’t know at all. The
second list will contain words that I am for the most part familiar with but where
I maybe don’t know all the different meanings or where I am unsure of how to
use them correctly. The third list will contain words that I already feel very
confident with.
After doing that I will start to look at my first list
and create a glossary that includes translations of the words, different
meanings of the words as well as example sentences in order to make it possible
for me to learn how the words are used correctly and synonyms and antonyms of
every word. I will do the same for the second and third list but it will take
me much less time, because those words are not completely new to me. Websites such as vocabulary.com,
thesaurus.com or various online monolingual dictionaries will help me creating
my three lists.
When I am done making my vocabulary lists I will start
going through the first one because it’s the most important to learn the words
that I don’t know at all. As soon as I feel confident about the first list I
will concentrate on the second and third list.
Looking at 700 different words, it seems very hard to
believe that I will be done creating my three lists and studying them all in
less than a month. The most important thing is to stay organized and to study
every day because 700 words you won’t be able to learn a week before the exam. I feel confident about my strategy and
I think it’s manageable to learn all the words by the end of January if I put enough
work and effort into it.
