When you start learning a new language and want to reach fluency in this language, you must master all its sections and delve into its vocabulary. Many people feel lost
and wonder how to start? And where to start?
In this article, we will talk about some steps that will help you choose the most effective way to learn the words you need to achieve your goals.
Step one:
Determine the type of vocabulary you want to learn.
Start by determining the type of vocabulary you want to learn. This may seem trivial, but it is a more effective method than you think. For example, you want to travel to Germany to attend a trade fair about industries? In this case, you should focus on vocabulary specialized in industries to understand what people are discussing.
Of course, in this case, the use of the language will be specific to a specific field, but it is common for language learners to want to learn generally used vocabulary, then your approach will definitely be different from the example above, so let’s assume that you are learning the language for general purposes such as travel. In this case, you must be familiar with and master commonly used vocabulary.
Step 2: Create a list of the vocabulary you want to memorize.
If you are a general language learner, there are a number of different types of vocabulary lists you may want to choose from:
1- Basic vocabulary lists:
Core words are the building blocks of all languages and should be learned from the beginning, but most of these words cover a narrow range of topics and are very basic words (mother, father, ate, cried, played, slept) but are just as valuable to an adult language learner as they are to a native-speaking child.
Core word lists range from 50 to 250 words.
While core word lists are very common in English and French, they are not always easy to find in other languages, you can find many free lists of foreign words on the Selingo website.
2- Travel word lists:
You may want to memorize common travel words. I think they are easily found in travel phrase books, and they cover a much wider range of basic vocabulary. For example, the food section of these books may include words for crab and other types of fish, but you probably won’t use any of these words very often in real life, so you can replace most of these words with “seafood.”
3- Common Word Lists:
You can benefit from common word lists, it is fairly easy to find lists for many widely used languages and they are almost non-existent for languages with few speakers and the reason for this is simple, which is that these lists take a long time to produce because they require a lot of content and search tools in addition to many people to extract words from them.
For example, common word lists for the English language are produced every few decades by researchers by collecting a large sample of printed texts, videos and audio clips and then they search for words and arrange them in terms of the most frequent and common to the least.
Learning the most common words and terms helps you absorb the language in an easy and simple way.
Step 3: Start studying words.
After determining the list of words you want to study, start studying them immediately! You may be tempted to study vocabulary by reading words aloud or writing them down, but make sure your word list includes a variety of parts of speech, such as nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs, as this will help you build basic sentences.
You may also want to see if there are any commonalities between the language you are learning and your native language, that is, synonyms and words that are common between the two languages. However, they are rarely spelled and pronounced exactly the same.
Step 4: Understand words by where they appear in different sentences.
Learning words in phrases and sentences is one of the most widely used methods that successful learners use to quickly build a large vocabulary. This is sometimes referred to as “sentence mining” or the “10,000 sentence approach.” Followers of this method memorize 10,000 sentences translated between the native and target languages.
The idea is that by using a large sample of sentences, a language learner will naturally develop a significant vocabulary and a quick and intuitive understanding of grammar.
I think it’s a great approach but what works for one person may not work for another. If you really want to learn new vocabulary, you should enjoy learning words so that you can benefit from them in everyday discussions. There are many ways to help you learn a lot of vocabulary, such as:
1- Listen to the radio or watch TV series in the new language with subtitles in your native language. Then you can make the connection between the spoken words and their translation.
2- Watch videos of funny conversations or pranks in the new language on YouTube.
Step 5: Don’t focus on memorizing definitions.
There are many words that have multiple meanings, but in reality you don’t need to memorize all of them because that would take a long time because some words have a large number of alternative meanings.
But they have an alternative definition, which is “a flock of crows.” This definition is not commonly known among native speakers, let alone students who are learning the language for the first time.
Instead, learn just a few of the most common definitions, which you might use in normal conversations, and with experience you will naturally learn more when you hear the same words used in different contexts. However, if you try to read a dictionary from cover to cover, you will face many challenges because memorizing every word and every definition in the language is ineffective and will most likely lead to wasting your effort. This method is mind-numbing and completely ineffective.
As a result, you don’t need to count the number of words you learn to become fluent. Instead, put your time and effort where it will yield the best results.
