HOW TO LEARN AND REMEMBER NEW WORDS IN ENGLISH - MY 5 EFFECTIVE TIPS. EXPAND YOUR VOCABULARY.

hello all thank you for joining me again i'm inside today because we have quite a serious topic to talk about and i don't want any background noise or masks to distract us yeah today i'm going to be teaching you five effective techniques for expanding your vocabulary in english plus one bonus tip at the end which is a little different to all the others okay let's start right now [Music] so let me start by telling you a quick personal story um now i'm english but i live in spain so i speak spanish as a second language but many years ago i was in a spanish supermarket and i was looking for the orange juice and i found the orange juice but i couldn't find orange juice with pulp so i found a shop assistant and i asked him in spanish to show me where the orange juice with pulp is so i said then i saw the shop assistant kind of stifling a laugh he was holding back from laughing and i realized i'd said something wrong and now for those who don't speak spanish pulpa is octopus pulpa is pulp and when i realized the mistake i'd made i felt terrible i felt embarrassed i felt a little bit humiliated by the way the shop assistant was very kind and he he he knew what i was saying and he took me to the orange juice with pulp but i've never forgotten that that memory has stuck in my mind and i've never made that mistake again i'll always remember that pulpo is octopus pulpa now the reason i've never forgotten that is because it has an emotional connection and this is my first point and for me it's the most important factor when trying to learn and remember new vocabulary now the emotion i felt as i said was embarrassment and a little bit of humiliation which are actually really good emotions if you want to remember vocabulary but of course you don't want to put yourself in those situations so what you need to do you need to try to simulate strong emotions when you're learning new vocabulary i'm going to give you an example a word that we're going to be using a lot in the next few months is curfew now curfew is a regulation requiring people to stay at home during specific hours usually at night so that's the definition that's the dictionary different definition but it's very difficult to remember the word curfew just from that definition that technical definition you need to make an emotional connection so tell yourself a story in your head so maybe you were out with your friends enjoying a good time and you realized it was late and you only had 10 minutes before the curfew so you had to run home and you saw the police and the police were going to catch you but you just arrived home before the curfew started so you've created this emotional connection this little bit of fear anxiety stress in a story it's not real but you've simulated this emotional connection so you will have a better chance of remembering the word curfew in the future the second important technique for learning new vocabulary is context context is key now i always encourage my students to take notes of new vocabulary so after a few months or years they tend to have these huge lists of vocabulary with their definitions or translations into their own languages and that's fine that's good um but in the end they're just lists on in black and white on a page and it's very very difficult to remember words just from a list with the definitions so you need context you need to put these words into context let me give you another example let's look at the phrasal verb to get rid of which means to dispose of to eliminate or to discard so you're not going to remember a complicated phrasal verb like get rid of just from the definition or even the translation you may remember it for a few hours or a day or so but in a couple of weeks you will not remember that phrasal verb unless you put it in context so for example you could say i wish we hadn't got rid of all those books when we moved i really miss them now again here you have the context to getting rid of old books but also you have the emotional connection which i spoke about just now the context is so important for really understanding how we use in this case the phrasal verb but it can be any vocabulary really it's so context is key extremely important you must also be selective let's be realistic you're not going to learn all the words in the english language that's just just not going to happen your brain has a limited capacity so you need to select the words that you think are going to be more useful to you so words that maybe you you think you're going to use for work for your studies for travel for speaking with friends etc it's personal to each individual so let's look at an example from a book on music while lennon mccartney's achievement in almost single-handedly sweeping away the songwriting incumbency of denmark street is as easily underestimated as their role in promoting the english language around the world the most remarkable single thing about them particularly by the standards of today is that for nearly five years they got better and better at what they did so some of the words in that text are extremely useful like underestimated remarkable achievement they're worth learning they're worth retaining but other words like incumbency and sweeping away do you really think you're ever going to use those words probably not when you're reading a book like this yeah you understand it enjoy it but don't worry about words which are not really essential or not really useful to your english my fourth tip is to make categories or word groups now one of my best students uses this technique to great success so well done jesus but i think other people can use it and get similar benefit from it now the idea is to form categories or groups of words with similar meanings so groups of words and expressions so let's look at an example let's look at a simple verb to like let's think of some expressions that are similar to like to be king non so i'm keen on photography for example my cup of tea so romantic comedy films are not my cup of tea to be into he is really into jazz music and to be mad for so she used to be mad for one direction so these are all expressions which are very similar to like but with different nuances dif slightly different meanings but you're putting them in the same category so when it comes time to remember them you can visualize in your mind the the diagram and the categories that you have that will really help you to remember and these diagrams can get bigger and bigger obviously you don't want them too big because they'll get very confusing but it's a very good way of visualizing these words on paper and as you can see i've used examples for the context too and my fifth tip is you have to use the vocabulary or you will lose it it's quite obvious i think most people know it but it's worth reminding you let's look at this quote from confucius get a bit pretentious here with confucius um so it's a very famous quote from him he said i hear and i forget i see and i remember i do and i understand so you have to use the vocabulary you have to do do the practice practical part of it to really understand the the words the vocabulary that you're using so now i know many people don't have opportunities to speak in english on a day-to-day basis but you can write write little stories for yourself or write comments on youtube videos facebook groups or just for yourself and i as i've said in a previous video you can talk to yourself just to use the new vocabulary and really internalize the vocabulary so it's it sticks in your mind and i promised you a bonus tip as i said it's a little bit different to the others because it's not about learning new vocabulary because you actually have a huge bank of vocabulary already that you don't use and that's called your passive vocabulary now we all have active and passive vocabulary and our passive vocabulary is much bigger than our active vocabulary so when it's in your second language you'll get great benefit from moving that passive vocabulary into your active vocabulary and you can do that just by being proactive again using it using the the vocabulary pay attention to the vocabulary you you know but you don't use and start using it in writing in speaking to force it from the passive part of your brain to the active part of your brain as i said you have this huge bank of vocabulary that you understand when you read a book you understand all these words when somebody is speaking you understand the words but you don't use them yourself so yeah that's the bonus tip passive to active what about you do you have any extra tips you can share with us in the comments that would be really useful if you could do that yeah like and subscribe if you liked the video and yeah thank you for joining me i'll see you again very soon for another video bye

Channel: To The Point English with Ben.

Views: 3,345

Keywords: how to learn and remember vocabulary, how to learn new vocabulary in english, how to learn new vocabulary words fast, how to learn new vocabulary, how to remember new vocabulary words, how remember new words, how to learn new words in english and remember them, how to remember new words in english, como aprender vocabulario en ingles, como aprender vocabulario em ingles, como aprender vocabulario en ingles rapido, como aprender vocabulario en ingles mas rapido y facil, Ben Gill

Id: uoovVpGwg0I

Length: 10min 31sec (631 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2020