杜宇

My view of memorizing vocabulary

宁波大学 杜宇

I often hear people complaining about the difficulty of remembering vocabulary, some even consider memorizing a certain amount of new words everyday as tormenting exercise, because they associate the process the process of memorizing vocabulary to tediousness, which require extra persistence to pull it through, others regard vocabulary as something that is easy to remember, but much easier to forget. While my suggestion is that you focus on the words that are frequently used in daily communication.

When you read English newspapers, magazines or textbooks, don't pick out every new word for you to memorize, you could simply make a judgement before spending time on them. Only choose the word that has meaning to you, I mean those you would probably use in your own life later on. Then, after getting acquainted to these words, try to bear them in mind wherever you go, to see whether you can reanimate these words against the present background. Just let your imagination go wild, and make a sentence or two upon your surroundings with new words. So when you come back and relive the situation you just experienced, it is much likely that the sentence you created just now would surface as well.

However, this way of remembering new words just help you have a deep impression at the beginning, as for an indelible understanding of new words, you'd better refer to them as often as possible.

One good choice is to read newspapers. Newspapers generally use luminous and practical words, and it seems that they have the same fixed set of vocabulary, which means you may find the same cluster of words applying to the similar topics in every issue. That enables you to consolidate your vocabulary steadily. But this is of course a passive way of remembering your words, so perhaps you could write down some sparkling sentences in the newspaper, and then try to read it several times a day, because putting new words in the context is much better and meaningful way of memorizing them, and you will better understand the words in the similar structure.

Listening to VOA or BBC is another good choice. It functions mainly as newspapers, but the difference is that, listening stimulates the audio differentiation of new words while reading helps more in the form of shape and order.

Finally, you should know, Rome is not built in a day, so memorizing vocabulary still needs a lot of time and energy.

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