Vocabulary is your weapon.
Use it effectively.
Contemporary English is filled with new words, collocations, phrasal words and other intresting things. And it is very important to catch up with these items, because I believe without them you won't become successesful language learner, even if you have perfect grammar.
At first you might be quite dazed and confused, because English vacabulary counts more that 1.4 billion words (GLM statistics) and a new word is added every 98 minutes, it is approximately 15 words per day. Impressive, huh? However, you don't need all 1.4 billion words to be understood and able to speak fluently, you need only 8000-10000 words in your vocabulary an half of them must be actively used. As you already could understand it won't come with a remarkable ease, you have to work hard enriching your vocabulary to be a sufficient learner.
Of course, it is hard to catch up with all the word and you won't make it at once, but there are various techniques and methods which will help you in your attempts. The old poverb sais - Many man, many minds, so it's up to you what method or technique you will choose, but here are some reccomendations:
At first you might be quite dazed and confused, because English vacabulary counts more that 1.4 billion words (GLM statistics) and a new word is added every 98 minutes, it is approximately 15 words per day. Impressive, huh? However, you don't need all 1.4 billion words to be understood and able to speak fluently, you need only 8000-10000 words in your vocabulary an half of them must be actively used. As you already could understand it won't come with a remarkable ease, you have to work hard enriching your vocabulary to be a sufficient learner.
Of course, it is hard to catch up with all the word and you won't make it at once, but there are various techniques and methods which will help you in your attempts. The old poverb sais - Many man, many minds, so it's up to you what method or technique you will choose, but here are some reccomendations:
- Always try to put down an unfamiliar word or phrase when you hear it somewhere to examine it later at home.
- Provide sufficient deffinitions. Even if the word is familiar, try to explain it in your own words, for you to know for sure that you are able to use this word in future.
. - Examples are required. Often words in English have more than one meaning, because of its usage in different life spheres. Examples will help you to clarify the meaning and use the word in the correct way.
- Use colours for different word types. It will be much easier to distinguish the collocations, phrasal verbs or even parts of speech using colourful markers for the word classification.
If you don't know how to say a word or a phrase in a correct way - use transcriptions to be clear with pronunciation.
- The synonym power! As I've already said, word in English language can have many shades of meaning, so it will be useful for you to have a couple synonyms in your vocabulary arsenal to sound more convincing.
Here are few my examples. And remember PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT.
http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/vocabulary_tips.htm
http://englishlive.ef.com/blog/improve-english-vocabulary-10-top-tips/
