Vocabulary Learning Strategies

Vocabulary Learning Strategies

Dear readers, first and foremost I must apologize to you as I haven't published any new blog posts for the past two weeks. However, as most of you know I am now part of the Erasmus+ student exchange program, and I've been in Graz Austria for two weeks already . I will write more about the city, its beauties, and impressions in some other post, but in this one I will focus on my vocabulary learning techniques.

Throughout my  three years bachelor studies at the Department of Translation and Interpreting in Macedonia and here at the ITAT I have come across  various strategies and techniques  that are used in studying new words, and the language itself.  I would like to briefly present the methods that I personally use and find very helpful.

Books, newspapers, internet articles etc.

Let's begin with books, newspapers, internet articles. I find all of these very useful for learning new words and improving my vocabulary. My advice is to use every free moment  to pick up a book or newspaper or whatever you prefer and read. The chances that you are going to come across some of the words  in  your vocabulary are very high, as the chances that you are going to remember  them  as well.

One vocabulary book I can recommend  is  Academic English by David Porter. It has various exercises created to help you learn and revise vocabulary, grammar, comprehension, and spelling.

Translate all the time

At the  University here in Graz, I have a subject called Text Competence in which I was introduced to the concept of Parallel Texts, which are basically texts or books where the native language and the target language are presented side by side. This is a very helpful way to study languages regardless of your level.

Another key point, regarding  translating techniques, is to write down all the unfamiliar words that you hear or read most frequently. For example einfach(simply),Unterschiede(differences), eigentlich(actually) or ziemlich(quite) are few of the  words that I was hearing  here all the time, so I sat down and translated them. Furthermore when you make a sentence with the newly learned word then you can be sure that it will be easier to memorize it.

Internet

We live in a time when technology and more precisely The internet  is involved more and more in every aspect of our daily lives. So, of course it is more than recommended to use it when we want to improve our vocabulary.
There are a few  internet sites that I have found to be beneficial in terms of improving my vocabulary, one of them is www.vocabulary.com. The site itself  claims to be „the quickest, most intelligent way to improve your vocabulary“. Our teacher has also shared lists he made from words in The Porter book and I am planning to experiment soon with creating my own.

It is inevitable to mention the smart phones and the applications. We can find tons of applications on google or apple store. Some of the ones that I use and can recommend are: Duolingo, Learning Languages: Rosetta Stone and Babbel, as well as Elevate, which is actually a brain training app, but it also contains words exercises, that are very helpful and useful in my opinion.

Corpora

Last but not least, I have to mention  Corpora. Corpora by definition is:’ A large collection of texts  that have been gathered in electronic form according to a specific set of criteria.’ (Bowker and Pearson 2002:9). This is the first time I am using them, but from what I have seen  so far, I can say that  they look tremendously useful for translators as well as for interpreters. I'm still exploring this concept, so expect a new post devoted only to this topic soon.

 I genuinely hope that I have helped you  in some way by sharing my vocabulary learning techniques and warmly recommend you  read books, watch movies, listen to music all in the language that you want to learn, write down all unknown words in your notebook , put sticky notes on things so you can see them all the time, find some similarities between some already known words and the new ones. What you do depends on you, but with continuous use of the above mentioned strategies, you will begin to see progress in no time at all.