Increasing Your Vocabulary

The more you advance in age, and the more life experience you accumulate, the more you come to realize that your English teachers were not just blowing smoke when they told you that it would be useful to have an extensive and well-rounded vocabulary. At the same time, however, it can be difficult to know exactly what to do in order to increase your vocabulary at this point, especially when there is not exactly the immediate motivation that used to be there when you needed to take a test in school!

Of course, the fact that you are no longer in school corresponds with the fact that you are no longer receiving grades on how well you can define a particular word, which means that you do not need to be able to give a word-for-word definition of what a particular word means; rather, you simply need to be able to use words correctly, and you need to understand what people are meaning to say when they use a particular word.

Students tend to think that the advice that they can "increase their vocabulary by reading" is funny, as they wonder how reading the word will help them if they do not know what the word means; of course, the reason students feel this way is because they are used to having to “define” words, but once you no longer need to create word-for-word definitions, reading is a great way to expand your vocabulary.

Another excellent way to expand your vocabulary is by listening to such radio stations as National Public Radio, or by listening to talk radio stations, or even by listening to books on tape; the more you spend time listening to “words” instead of listening to music, the more words you will learn.

And of course, “studying” words is the best way of all to learn new words – and even though you are no longer in school, and therefore no longer “have to” study words, taking the time to do this can go a long way in improving the vocabulary you have to work with!