How I plan on studying for my vocabulary exam

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.

Vocabulary Learning

Learning languages has always been a passion of mine and something I was quite good at. However, one of my least favorite aspects about learning a foreign language used to be vocabulary learning. I’ve never been a person who liked the ordinary way of learning vocabulary: in my opinion sitting down and learning random words without actual context by heart isn’t a good way to memorize them for a long time. Sure, they are saved in the short-term memory and you’ll pass your vocabulary test, but two weeks later half of them are forgotten. That’s why I now use different methods to memorize vocabulary.

For me it’s very important to learn words in the right context. Most of the time I don’t think it actually makes sense to know the meaning of an isolated word, but not how to use it in a sentence. If I look up a word, I always do so in a monolingual dictionary to learn synonyms and I make sure that I find a few example sentences to really understand the meaning of the word. A big part of my English vocabulary knowledge also stems from reading English books. Over and over again I read commonly used words and phrases in the right context and after some time I automatically memorize them. I usually try to guess words I don’t know based on the context they occur in and if I don’t understand something I will look it up. 

However, reading books, watching television series or movies and listening to radio programs is fun and easy to do, but it’s obviously not enough. No matter how much I surround myself with English in my daily life, I won’t get around studying and learning vocabulary – it’s inevitable. That’s why I use other ways to memorize vocabulary and not the boring method of learning everything by heart and forgetting it a week later. My favorite method so far is using interactive websites like vocabulary.com. I like doing quizzes, filling in words in example sentences or match words with their synonyms because I think that way I remember them in the right context and don’t forget them as fast. In my opinion the key to remember stuff in general – not only vocabulary – is to understand it and be able to connect it to other related topics. So for me it’s important to know possible collocations of a word and when and how to use it.   

Of course, sometimes there is no way around the good old method of learning a list of words by heart. If I absolutely have to do so, I always make sure to write the list by hand because somehow I have the feeling that I remember words better if I have written them down myself and not just printed them out and read them through. Still, I probably won’t ever be a big fan of learning things by heart and definitely favor other methods of memorizing vocabulary.