Vocab Learning Strategies

My preferred method of learning vocabulary is doing the exercises on Vocabulary.com, primarily the Porter lists. I also use thesaurus.com and sticky notes, but I generally avoid corpora. I would like to use more dictionary apps, but most require internet access which I don’t have all the time.

I like using Vocabulary. com for several reasons. Firstly, I like being able to store the words I want to learn and sort them the way I prefer, be it alphabetically or according to my learning progress. Secondly, the generated vocabulary quizzes I can make myself are by far the most entertaining and satisfactory way to learn vocabulary. They test you on different meanings of the word, set it in different contexts, make you find their antonyms or synonyms and, of course, check your spelling of it. Even if studying online does get a little tedious at times, the site tries to keep you interested and motivated through achievements, classes and leader boards. If you’ve answered correctly five times in a row, you get an achievement. You mastered a word, also achievement. You managed to rake up an impressive amount of points- you get a higher class.

Along with Vocabulary.com, I also find thesaurus.com to be extremely useful. It is a site where you can search for synonyms. It’s very easy to use and the result filters are extremely useful. You can sort them by length or complexity, making academic words easy to spot. Nevertheless, I usually double check this on Vocabulary.

Sometimes I also use a more old-fashioned approach; sticky notes. I write down the word I want to learn on a sticky note and stick it somewhere I can see it every day. This method is mostly reserved for words that are really hard to memorize or are impossible to spell.

I generally don’t use corpora. I don’t know exactly why, but somehow I just find them annoying to use. You usually already have to know a word in order to look it up. However, unlike the dictionary, the corpus does not provide a clear definition. It does show words in different contexts, but these results are usually not sorted by word meanings. Since most learners’ dictionaries provide at least one or two examples for every meaning anyway, it’s not like you’re left completely in the dark.