Tips to Boost Vocabulary

Hello, this is Jessica Martinez calling from San Diego, California.

Hello, Jessica.

How are you?

I’m doing great. How are you both doing?

Super duper.

We’re glad to hear from you. What’s up?

I had a couple questions, and they’re all sort of separate but related.

And it’s on how to begin a path towards building a more savvy or richer vocabulary.

I was wondering if you all had a pool of books, recommendations,

As far as being helpful, and especially with retaining words.

Any tips or tricks, techniques on how to retain certain words you come across

That you find you’d like to keep in your vocabulary.

Well, what have you tried so far, Jessica?

First of all, I try to do, actually, is I try to see if I can guess words

That I’m not familiar with, which I come across based on where it’s used.

Then I’ll find the definition, and I try to read a little bit more

About the history behind it.

And then I will just try to, you know, read over these words and just kind of practice them and then later apply them.

But I was just wondering if perhaps, you know, you had some other techniques as far as, you know, retaining them and not forgetting.

Because I tend to be very forgetful.

I need to constantly kind of read things over several times before I can actually remember them.

Well, Jessica, I hope you’re relieved to hear that you are doing it exactly right.

Oh, okay. That’s great.

That is the best way to learn new words.

It’s not to buy books that have SAT vocabulary.

It’s not to go out and look for these lists of difficult words that are on the Internet.

Or it’s not to, I don’t know, trust somebody when they tell you that these are the hundred words you need to know to have a successful career.

It’s to read good literature and then to make notes when you find a word you don’t know.

If you look in the files and papers of all the best writers over the last several hundred years, they’ve all done this.

This is how they add words to their own vocabulary.

So it’s time-tested, and it maybe sounds a little dorky to take notes while you’re reading.

Because, you know, sometimes we feel like reading is supposed to be about pleasure, and if you’re writing something down, then maybe you’ve turned it into a task.

And something that’s supposed to be simple and pleasurable has suddenly become a chore, maybe.

But really, if you read a book, say, of 1,000 pages or 500 pages, you should come away with several note cards with 25 to 50 words on them.

I mean, any book will do this.

Just pick a Dickens novel, and you’ll come away with tons of stuff.

And once you get attuned to finding words, and maybe you’re there already, where your eye just lights on these words.

You’re like, aha, there’s another one, and you write it down.

It becomes kind of a scavenger hunt.

And the pleasure increases as you’re reading these books because you say, oh, here’s another one I can add to my vocabulary.

Right, right.

Okay, I’m with you.

So I’m not alone, and that’s great.

So you’re saying that reading them in context is more helpful than just looking at a list cold or flashcards or something like that.

Absolutely.

I mean, I don’t want to turn this too much into a wonky conversation, you two.

But I should tell you that there’s plenty of study that has been done about how people learn language and learn vocabulary.

And it is conclusive that context, seeing a word in its natural environment, is the best way to learn what a word means.

And I know I’m a dictionary editor and I write definitions and I work on dictionaries.

That’s one way to do it.

But it’s a shortcut.

Really, the long way to do it is to find the word in multiple contexts.

And then you’ll learn from those multiple contexts all of its different nuances and all the different shades and pastels and all the different ways that it can be used.

So we haven’t given you any books of lists of words

But I think we’ve given you the best way to go, Jessica.

It makes total sense.

Okay, great.

Thanks for calling, Jessica.

Thank you so much for having me.

And you guys have a wonderful day.

You too, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

That’s wonderful.

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