Top 6 Mistakes When Learning Vocab - Paul Newson

[Music] hi guys welcome back to my youtube channel now I have a video on how to learn vocab and there are so many on YouTube and around the internet etc etc but quite often it's very hard to find a video on the mistakes that students make when learning vocab because students always fiddle is never enough what they learn for an exam or they never feel fully prepared and of course we as teachers try to give as much as we can we try to give advice on how to learn vocab how to practice it recycle it etc etc but of course if you are trying to get an A in F say ye a CA or CPA or maybe AB + 8 and above in IELTS a lot of that learning comes down to you as the student you need to sort of face that vocabulary on a sort of daily basis and that's what many students don't do or they do they do it wrong so I want to kind of explain to you what we should avoid let's have a look at the first one less is more that's one of my favorite expressions in the whole sort of teaching sphere I sometimes find the students go a bit crazy sometimes learning vocab they write down sort of 50 bits of vocab and they're not going to remember most of those it's too much especially it's like if it's like a big chunk of language like a whole sentence or phrase or an idiom you're not going to learn 50 idioms a day like even I can't so again less is more meaning that it is better maybe to have 20 a day and actually learn those and use them properly and then the next day to do 20 rather than 50 most of those which you won't remember as a very sort of important point let's go down to the next one a vocab recorded but not recycled now this is a very important point - now most students do write down vocab in my lessons and at home they write down some vocab but usually what happens they write it down on a piece of paper or in their vocabulary book and they never look at it again and that's the problem you know I think I read somewhere that you should learn or recycle a piece of vocab seven times before it stays in your brain it's like I'll show you here as well the same principle I have another video on my youtube channel called the problem with learning Murphy's now I like this book very much and most of you probably know this book but it's the same principle here you could like do say this unit here names with them without their for example and do the exercises you turn over to do the next units and you're probably not going to look at the previous one again or for a very long time so you're just not recycling it enough so that's the sort of very important point so by writing down say fewer words or fewer collocations at least if you do recall them you should recycle them now a good way to recycle is to make your own sentences to make your own examples play with the grammar you know add some other bits of English even for example if you are just doing like a vocab exercise let's just say from this book I was like I'll explain this one in a minute this is a very good book by the way but even here when you do say one of the vocabulary exercises here and this one's about energy from fossil fuels and this is advanced vocabulary by the way again you know once you've kind of done this exercise here will make your own examples play with the vocabulary instructions that you have and just be imaginative with it and that way it will stay in your head a lot longer and something's just fallen out of my book so we go into the next point heavily reliance on reference books so I'll pick it up again so again this is a vocabulary reference book now of course there are quite a few that you can buy I do like this series they used to be pretty bad but the new updated versions are pretty good in my opinion but again you know there's lots of good vocab here but I kind of find that it's the minimum especially if you're doing CAE cpe is not enough at all even as it gets say a level 8 and above in IELTS you need something more than this so a lot of students who learn English themselves will stick to such books and it's a bit of a problem because again you know good stuff but it's just not enough and again a lot of the examples are quite specific and you need to sort of play with sort of other sources so you've got to move away just from these reference books so this should be a part of your learning but not the main part if you understand because that comes on to the next point lack of authentic sources be to and above now you'll find guys when you go to like a lot of YouTube videos or you go online to look at back AB you Larry lists there is often not much dedicated to learning which is b2 and above it's easy to write vocab list for elementary and quite often if you do find vocabulary lists at higher level it's just the list without any explanation and that's a problem I even saw this on one of the Russian social network VK with phrasal verbs without examples it's useless and it means nothing but with authentic sources what I mean by this is that like again when you are sort of upper intermediate and above you can go online read the BBC read The Guardian it's not easy but it has to be done and you've got to practice getting faster and understanding more read literature read some of the National Geographic or discovery watch Discovery Channel or something like that to get that topical vocabulary that you wouldn't find quite often in a textbook for your class or even sometimes in a reference book because it's not enough I want to give you sort of an example and now I teach CPE at the moment and one of my students recently wrote this essay I want to read you some of it now I kind of explained to them the necessity of using authentic sources so they had to write a restaurant review for CPA from the book expert proficiency I think it's unit 5 if I'm not mistaken and I said to them okay before you write this essay I want you to go onto Google type into Google like positive and negative restaurant reviews and just have a look at some of the structures that they have and you know some of the sentences so don't just record single words because that's not useful you want to record whole structure sometimes a whole sentence that you can transplant into your speaking or into your essay because you're going to recycle it and the student wrote this and I want to read you sort of two paragraphs just to show you the difference that using authentic sources can make of course it's CP is high-level but here we go the tel telling name or this legendary borderline posh restaurant my utterly mislead you I like wine 2.0 is far beyond - a be drinking pit it's being the epitome of elegant dining experience the place with a wunderkind chef offers a uniquely sartorial menu infused with mouth-watering starters and fabulously gobsmacked in main courses with fish prevailing on the cart the choice of wine can hardly be beaten probably only by a three floor dragons of heil in london however teetotal you might be you'll definitely fail to resist the temptation of a staggering choice of drinks being exposed the lucrative abundance of potent full body or lighthearted fruity sparkling wines you will take your demise meekly and embrace an all-night frolic wholeheartedly in bloody hell i mean god that mean it's better than what native speakers can produce and she hasn't copied that from a source she basically just took parts of authentic sources and manipulated it into her essay and as a result is perfect it's just amazing because guys you've got to get your vocabulary from somewhere and if you really want to achieve that high level like c1c2 you've got to go to authentic sources so read them regularly and record the vocab that you think is quite useful now coming to another point a big problem with students recalling vocab is often disorganized so even in my classes I mode as students when they write down vocab like around the corner of the page of the textbook and I said you're not going to remember that and you're not going to look at it again it's really disorganized so you've got to have a nice vocabulary book which is clean and tidy with examples and references by again by recording like say fewer pieces of language I don't want to say words like pieces of language like a whole sentence or a collocation three or four words an idiom expression by doing like a bit a bit less you're more likely to kind of say check it again and again and also if it's tidy you're going to look at it again remember your university days maybe like if you were just scribbling notes down in a very untidy way you really wouldn't probably look a second time unless it was something that was clean and organized then you would so it's kind of psychological the last point here is choice of unnecessary items now this is a difficult thing because sometimes if you're going to read a book or let's especially sort of like you know National Geographic or Time magazine or whatever because in the FCA CA in CP they ask on those themes they never ask on Harry Potter as much as we like Harry Potter they don't ask about these so you really want to make sure that you read these kind of sources but when you do record vocabulary you might see they were like post-mortem you're probably not going to use post-mortem in your spoken English very often but you again it's a good sort of passive word but if you see the collocation bitterly disappointed well you know that disappointed but you record this care location because you see it for the first time meaning very disappointed and it's a very natural thing you know you can use that in your speaking like if you had a CAE part one question you know you know what's important for you and a friend well the most important thing for me is not to feel bitterly disappointed if someone were to let me down so a friend should be reliable as an examiner I would listen to those colored cases think that's really really good and you get them from real sources you're not going to get many of them from reference books it's real sources and again you can't you want to record things which you think may be okay I know this but I like the structure I like the combination of those words I can use that if you see something very specific with a cultural reference you're not going to really maybe need that so much if you don't use it in your own language but it's good for passive knowledge anyway so again guys those are my six points I really wanted to highlight that are important when you know the mistakes people make when learning vocabulary so when you follow my advice then you change it then well you know your English is going to be perfect very very soon so guys I hope that video was useful thumbs up as usual and I will see you again for another video goodbye

Channel: Practice English with Paul

Views: 4,667

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Id: 6LNLuTHO070

Length: 10min 5sec (605 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 26 2019