Increasing Your Vocabulary

Building your English vocabulary is ongoing undertaking since English is forever growing. Learning new words should be a lifelong effort and the number one strategy for building your vocabulary is to train yourself to be always looking for words that are new to you. You can do this while you are reading books, magazines and newspapers. Have your dictionary on hand so that when needed you can take a peek at it once you encounter a word that is unfamiliar.

In order to increase your vocabulary, you will have to read at least one book and a number of magazines every single week for the rest of your life. As you find words that is not known to you, the technique is to stop reading and make an effort to recognise what it may mean based on the context of the sentence. Try to focus on how the word looks and its sound. Then look for its meaning in the dictionary. As you do this, you could discover that the word keeps appearing more often as you continue to read books, magazines and newspapers.

A further method is to ensure that you open your mind to new concepts and ideas as each and every word symbolizes a new notion. You may have to look to those fields of knowledge that are still unknown to you, like semantics, psychology, music and art. Once you have chosen field that you find fascinating, you can start reading book on that certain subject. This will bestow you with a greater understanding of the field and you can learn additional words as you continue to expose yourself to it.

The next step is to let these new words to linger in your mind. An effective way to do this is to use them in your writing or in your speech. If you apply them appropriately, nobody will likely even observe that you have been adding to your vocabulary. If somebody does notice it and attempts to discourage you, just keep focused on your goal because the next strategy is to establish a goal of how many new words to learn each day. While this could appear to be difficult at first, you will soon find out that with each day of practise the process becomes easier.

You may also want to spend time on websites that help you build your vocabulary. There are lots of online resources that can help you. You can also try doing crossword puzzles and other word games.

Julie Thomas is from EnglishGrammarSoft.com a website featuring information on writing correction software and other ESL grammar resources.