How to increase your vocabulary in a short time? To do this, there are various exercises and techniques that do not require much time and effort. Read more, communicate with interesting people, be open to the world - these are the simple secrets of accumulating vocabulary. But this baggage will not burden the owner; on the contrary, it will bring benefit and respect.
Get rid of parasitic words
Make room for new expressions. Eliminate from your speech “uh-uh”, “well”, “as if”, “that’s the same” and the like, as well as obscene language and clichés. Send them overly meaningful expressions like “really”, “fuck” and “cool”.
The trouble with them is that they can replace a significant part of the vocabulary and make speech poor.
Be aware of unwanted words. Record your own speech on a camera or voice recorder, imagine that you are at an interview or presentation. Reread your social media posts.
Analyze all this and write down the words and expressions that you want to get rid of. Share this list with a friend or colleague, ask him to pull you down every time he hears forbidden language.
Exercises
Special exercises that need to be performed regularly will help increase your vocabulary.
- Synonyms. We often use the same word without thinking that it can be replaced and give the expression a new color. For example, change the beloved word “cool” to “great, excellent, wonderful, luxurious, notable, mind-blowing, stunning, excellent, creditable.” Remember what words you repeat day after day and abandon them in favor of synonyms.
- Retelling. If you watched an interesting movie or read a book, tell your friends about it. Try to make the retelling lively and detailed, achieve the absolute attention of your interlocutor, let the story captivate him. Ideally, the response to your half-unfinished retelling would be “Don’t tell me any more, I want to watch/read it myself!”
- Parasite cleanup mission. We utter as many vermin words every day as there were no Colorado potato beetles in Colorado in 1859. These are absolutely unnecessary pests that do not carry any meaning. Usually a person says “well, sort of” when he can’t find a word. To avoid having to insert a filler word, it is better to remain silent, think, and then speak. By the way, another advantage of a rich vocabulary is that you don’t have to spend a lot of time finding the right word. The combo method is great for getting rid of parasites: they said a harmful word - throw money into the piggy bank. The benefits will be twice as great.
Connect with people different from you
Your usual social circle is constantly “cooking” in the same vocabulary, because you have the same interests and topics for discussion. You've probably noticed that when someone in your company finds another job or meets new people, their speech changes. He sprinkles unusual words, jokes, and even the manner of conversation can become completely different.
Every new person changes you. Therefore, strive to constantly expand your circle of acquaintances. Chat at the gym, in the store, attend more events and find people to talk to on the Internet. Don't push away those who are different from you.
How to expand your vocabulary. Second.
To enrich the set of phrases, you need to speak them (but here it is not necessary out loud, it can be in writing, it can be in thoughts, internal dialogue).
IN ORDER TO IMMEDIATELY REMEMBER THE RIGHT WORDS, YOU MUST USE THEM.
That is, talk often. Remember often. Use it.
One of the ways to improve the quality of speech is writing (this is not the only way)
That is: write letters, chat, answer questions, explain something, prove something. And so on. This way you can expand your vocabulary.
It is useful to develop written language. But don’t retell it, but come up with your own thoughts. It tests and develops vocabulary well.
And the more new, unfamiliar topics (and words) there are for written communication, the better!
write colloquially
Just as you say.
Think and immediately write. Right along the line of thought.
This is how I do it now.
And this is not just my opinion, this is the opinion of many experts.
Everything that you come up with and write down in this way is your ready-made thoughts, ready-made phrases.
This expands our ability to find the right words. This skill will be transferred to ordinary speech, because the process is the same.
But when you write, no one is pushing you, you can actually look for the right word for some time without worrying. And in written speech, no matter how, you cannot replace a word with a gesture or facial expression.
Dear reader! Please click on this advertisement as a token of gratitude for the useful materials on the site. Thank you!
But!
Write
Start a personal diary or blog on social networks. Write down your thoughts and events every day in great detail. Write about your goals and desires, come up with stories and stories. When communicating with friends, avoid jagged messages and do not use emojis instead of words.
First, writing is a great way to apply and reinforce what you've learned. Secondly, if you write by hand, this will help The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking remember new words even better.
Don't have time to read the entire article? Watch the shortened version in our video:
Some people try to enrich their vocabulary in order to be interesting conversationalists, make useful connections and make a favorable impression on people. Others need improved vocabulary for professional and creative purposes - from inventing poetry and musical lyrics to writing scientific dissertations.
- FAQs How to learn to speak correctly and beautifully? 11 great tips to help you
You should also have a clear goal, even if not necessarily a specific one. For example, you can calmly start learning new words and speech structures for general development. And don’t doubt it, you will definitely need it.
So, let's get down to practical advice.
Use cards
If you can’t remember a very complex and interesting word, use the flash card method. Many people have been familiar with this method since school.
On one side of the card you write the word, on the other - its meaning. First you need to try to remember the answer yourself, and then turn the element over and test yourself.
This method is very simple and effective: the memorization process begins with preparation. Therefore, it is better not to use applications, but to create cards yourself and write on them by hand. And you can take a small stack with you anywhere.
Reading
Reading is one of the best ways to increase your vocabulary.
Of course, we are talking about quality literature, and not about cheap heart-warming novels or monotonously meaningless detective stories.
High-quality literature means not only domestic and foreign classics. Someone will like the 4th volume of “War and Peace”, and someone in the process of reading this will want to repeat the fate of Anna Karenina. Reading should be a pleasure, you just need to find an author you like. Evgeny Grishkovets, Boris Akunin, Sergei Lukyanenko - this is a small list of modern authors whose works are worth paying attention to.
Exercise
- Make sentences where each word begins with the next letter of the alphabet. For example: “The stork was a magnificent accordion player. Even the raccoons howled pitifully and nodded their curious faces, enjoying the charming songs. That skill became fatal, fatal. The gloomy heron ambitiously threw poison at the puny, selfish youth.”
- Make up stories from words belonging to one part of speech. Describe your morning using only nouns. “Ring, wake up, alarm clock, turn off. Getting up, searching, clothes. Approach, window, opening, freshness. Cheerfulness, spirituality, joy." Using the same principle, compose stories with only verbs, adjectives or participles. This activity seems simple only at first: if you set out to add more and more details, you will have to learn to carefully select words and pull them out of the passive vocabulary.
- Make tautograms. This is the name for sentences whose words all begin with the same letter. Here is an example from the work “Olgin Island” by Nikolai Kultyapov: “Onufry’s father, Osip Ostromirovich Ordynsky, graduated from Oxford full-time. He definitely refused to stay away from the Fatherland and went back. The possessed Ordynsky announced a survey of individual districts, regions, and vast outskirts.”
- Choose synonyms and antonyms for words. This exercise can be done anywhere and anytime. If you're bored in line or at lunch, come up with a synonym for the word. For example, “beautiful” is picturesque, wonderful, gratifying, wonderful, and so on. Do the same with antonyms.
How to read books
It is quite obvious that to enrich your vocabulary it is useful to read a lot - just what and how exactly should you read? For our generation, the reference speech will most likely be the mid-twentieth century, which, on the one hand, is close to modern in many ways, and on the other, has not yet had time to absorb the barbarisms and jargon that came during the perestroika era
Having picked up a work of art, we, as a rule, quickly get carried away by the plot, stop paying attention to the vocabulary, and the linguistic richness of the novel happily passes all our radars. To avoid this, you can use a psychological trick and read memoirs, autobiographies or any other books written in the first person
If you read them slowly and thoughtfully, and ideally also out loud, ready-made phrases will settle in your memory that we can use when talking about ourselves. True, these phrases must be retrieved from memory as quickly as possible so that they do not disappear into the muck of a passive dictionary.
Reading and memorizing poetry is doubly useful - you learn not only vocabulary, but also syntax. Despite the fact that in Russian the order of words in a sentence is quite free, we do not like to take full advantage of this freedom (which is quite rational from the point of view of saving mental effort). Each of us has favorite syntactic constructions that limit our lexical range - accordingly, if we dream of expanding this range, we need to take a creative approach to constructing phrases. For example, if we are accustomed to using impersonal sentences in the spirit of “I want,” the synonymous series will turn out to be predictably narrow: “I dream / I want / I need / I need.” But as soon as you express the same thought with the help of subject and predicate, “I want,” the room for maneuver will expand: “I demand / I desire / I insist / I need” and so on. When you write sketches, feel free to juggle the order of words, rearrange the syntax, insert participial and participial phrases more often - this is a good incentive to activate passive vocabulary.
Finally, the most important thing. Don’t treat vocabulary acquisition as a responsible, multi-step task for which you need to set aside time and gather your courage. This is not rhythmic gymnastics or neurosurgery, where you need to spend many years and efforts to achieve results. Incorporating new words into speech is an extremely natural process, starting at a very early age, continuing until the end of life and, frankly, not at all difficult.
Icons: 1) Berkay Sargın, 2) Thomas Le Bas, 3) Kelig Le Luron, 4) Iris Vidal.
“William Shakespeare’s dictionary, according to researchers, is 12,000 words. The dictionary of a black man from the cannibal tribe “Mumbo-Yumbo” is 300 words. Ellochka Shchukina easily and freely made do with thirty,” everyone is familiar with this quote from “The Twelve Chairs” by Ilf and Petrov. The satirists, and with them the readers, had a good laugh at the narrow-minded and undeveloped, but overly self-confident and arrogant Ellochka, all of whose interests, thoughts and emotions easily fit into thirty words. Meanwhile, when they start writing texts, many, without noticing it themselves, turn into the cannibal Ellochka. Whatever they want to write about, the same “Ho-ho!” comes out from the pen. and “Be rude, boy!” In this lesson we will talk about how to get rid of the problem of the cannibal Ellochka and expand your vocabulary. And in the next lesson we will learn how to learn to use it correctly.
