Most potent way of improving vocab is reading quite a lot of stuff including newspaper, magazines, english speaking books, novels, journals etc. Most of the words which are currently in vogue and not included in dictionaries yet, can be found in above mentioned reading materials. The key is to realize, more you read, better are the chances of coming across new words. It also helps to keep taking vocab test every now and then. One should also realize that, trying to mug words doesn’t help much. One should develop genuine fondness for reading and that proves very crucial in grasping and retaining new words.
Few other methods apart from voluntarily reading are;
- Focusing on learning prefixes, suffixes and roots. Many people will vouch for this technique for its effectiveness. So how does this work? Knowing prefixes, suffixes and roots gives us a hint about the meaning of the words. Once we get a hang of these, anticipating meanings of even difficult words will not pose many problems. Let’s understand this with an example; ‘pathy’ means feeling. We must have heard many words with this suffix like, sympathy (similar sort of feelings), antipathy (negative feelings) or apathy (absence of feelings) or empathy. We can follow this pattern and try to find out other suffixes and can test ourselves.
- Flash cards method. What if we manage to incorporate a bit of fun while learning? Surely, it makes things more interesting and fun as well. Flash cards is one of those interesting way to build up your vocab. Writing words on one side of the cards and the meaning on the other side. This is convenient as well as amusing.
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