As I
mentioned in my last blog post about vocabulary, learning vocabulary isn’t
really my favorite way of spending my free time. However, seeing as I’ll have a
massive vocabulary exam in January for which I’ll have to learn over 700 words,
I know that I’ll probably have to spend much more time on studying words than I
did before. Because if I’m honest, I have to admit that I’ve spent way too
little time studying vocabulary this semester and I know I have to step up my
game if I want to pass this exam. I also know I have to become more organized
in order to get everything done in this short time.
When facing
such a huge number of words to learn, I can’t just randomly start without a
system. I need some kind of strategy otherwise I’d probably be confused after a
short time. The first step of my strategy is to make a glossary of all the
words I have to learn. Vocabulary.com is a great website to look up the meaning
of a word, but for this exam it is required to know much more. Additionally to
the meaning of the word, we’ll have to know collocations, synonyms, antonyms, how
to pronounce it, etc. Basically we’ll have to know pretty much everything about
the word and that means that even though I enjoy doing the quizzes on
vocabulary.com or other online apps, it won’t be enough for this exam.
So making a
glossary it is. Even though I can’t solely use vocabulary.com to prepare myself
for this exam, it’s still a good place to start. The website gives really good
explanations and meanings of the words, so it’s still going to be useful for my
glossary. Other than vocabulary.com I will use monolingual dictionaries such as
the Cambridge dictionary to determine all the meanings for a word.
To understand
the meaning of the word better I’ll also look for example sentences in these
dictionaries. For me, knowing a word means to be able to use it in the right
context and the best way of understanding how to use a word in the right
context is to look up example sentences.
Monolingual
dictionaries are also a great way to check my pronunciation. Most of the
dictionaries – and also vocabulary.com – offer audio files of the words where
native speakers pronounce it the right way. It’s also great that most offer
both, the American and British pronunciation, because I want to get a more
authentic American accent.
Corpora,
for example the Corpus of Contemporary American English, are really useful for
finding collocations. They usually give a list with the most common
collocations and sometimes also how frequently they are used.
To find
synonyms and antonyms, thesaurus.com is a very useful websites. Here all
synonyms and antonyms of a word are listed, sorted by how close they are to the
meaning of the original word. Additionally
to that I can also use monolingual dictionaries.
Looking at
all these criteria, it’s hard to believe that I’ll be able to finish my list in
a month. That’s why I skimmed through the list of words before starting my
glossary and I picked out the words I didn’t know at all or have never used
before. These are the words I have to focus on first and after that I’ll
concentrate on the rest. However, in the end I will have to study all words,
because even though I know how to use quite a few on the list, I’m not
completely sure I know every single aspect of the word.
On top of
all these points above, one factor is the most important: that I learn daily. Considering
the huge amount of words, I won’t be able to write that glossary a week before
the exam. I need to sit down every day and learn at least a few words. Because
even if one month sounds like much time at first, in reality it isn’t. I think
it’s doable to learn all these words until the end of January, but only if I
put as much time and effort as possible in it.
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