How to increase your vocabulary? It would seem a simple question, but there are rules or certain tricks, but which ones exactly, the article will be about them today, in the “Copywriting” section. Hello to all guests and readers;).
As you know, there are several types of words in our vocabulary:
- 1 group. Frequently used: "Family", "Work", "Internet", "May", "Very".
- 2 group. We know the meaning, but we practically don’t pronounce it: “Fetish”, “Outsider”, “Empathy”, Feedback (feedback).
- 3rd group. We do not know the meaning and do not use: "Workshop - collective learning", "Eugenics" - the doctrine of the inheritance of various positive qualities, "Crowdfunding" - voluntary participation of people in any projects. Agree, it is necessary to study their meaning in order to realize that you understand what is at stake when you meet such words in the speech of other people, on the Internet or in the press.
Eight Rules for Improving Your Vocabulary
It's no secret that there are many techniques, exercises to replenish your set of words, they all have the right to exist and help you write beautiful texts or just become a better conversationalist. I am sure that these little tricks listed below will also come in handy for bloggers, copywriters who work remotely, without being tied to a place. Agree, today everyone needs high-quality, interesting content, which should actively attract traffic and subsequently monetize.
Rule 1: Communicate Constantly
You can learn new words from different sources - this is communication, your own experience and purposeful independent study of new terms, concepts, expressions, borrowed words.
Accordingly, conversations, correspondence with friends, successful people from different fields help to constantly learn new things. At a minimum, it develops the ability to establish contacts, communication, and communication skills.
As a maximum, regular communication with others helps not only to maintain relationships with other people, but also during the conversation there will literally be an exchange of words with the interlocutor. Plus, conversation is a great opportunity to show off your intellect by testing new words.
2. Rule: write and read more often
This rule can be prioritized by others. Well, if it is at least 1 written article per week, one book read per month. Choose your frequency and pace. Read: books, reviews, essays, interesting and necessary blogs, websites on various topics.
3. Rule: develop not only professionally
Divide work and personal time, think about your interests, hobbies. I know that finding time for them is not easy, especially when the main work takes up most of the time. But once you find a topic that interests you, you will magically start finding time to study it, every day.
Take at least any blogger, there is an interest in this type of activity on the Internet and he is constantly learning something new for himself, while constantly replenishing his stock of knowledge, words, professional terms. There is only one conclusion, find an activity that you really like, the main thing is to understand what is right for you;).
Rule 4: Don't be afraid to invest time and money in your education
Educated and informed people, as a rule, have a broader outlook, they are better versed in their professional activities. Therefore, today the desire of people to invest in their education is growing. How you will improve your professional level, decide for yourself. For example, it can be educational webinars, online trainings, universities, books, business trips...
5. Rule: study, memorize, use synonyms
The Russian language has, on average, from 3 to 30 synonyms for each word. However, there are a number of words that we use all the time. By deleting or replacing one word for another day after day, we can significantly expand our vocabulary, avoid repetition of words.
Another example, a common phrase "Because" can be replaced: “due to the fact that; because; due to the fact that; as; because of; due to the fact that; because" and others.
Take any of your articles, try to replace frequently occurring words with suitable synonyms, but in such a way that the meaning of your publication does not suffer. The ideal option would be a personal collection of the necessary synonyms for those words that have already become a habit in your vocabulary. Analyze your texts so that tomorrow you can start writing and speaking a little better than today.
Rule 6: Read aloud regularly
Why out loud? Reading, thus, texts, words, books, we not only see them, but also hear, pronounce. Thus, we better remember and successfully replenish our vocabulary. Making your own YouTube channel is the best way to learn how to speak out loud yourself.
7. Rule: retell read, listened to texts, watched movies
When new information has just been received by us, then retelling it in a conversation, we begin to use exactly the words that we heard, saw, read. Thus, new active words naturally appear in our vocabulary. To stimulate the growth of vocabulary, be sure to look into the explanatory dictionary, Wikipedia, Google, in order to more accurately find out the meaning of a previously unknown word or term.
8. Rule: learn by heart
This should become part of your daily life. Memorize poems, song words, quotes, aphorisms, proverbs, foreign phrases, words, synonyms, anecdotes, in the end;). This is a great pastime, especially when you are in transport, a car, you don’t lose time, but you replenish your vocabulary.
Conclusion. Today, according to labor market experts, about 3 million people work remotely, and this trend will continue to grow. Constantly increasing your set of active words, you can always find work on the Internet in various popular specializations and get around the competition, these are types of work: copywriter, rewriter, maintaining your business blog, working as an editor of a website, forum, social media. networks, telephone sales manager. Options and proposals really sea. Good luck! Read: "
Interesting and competent - it is not necessary to be a philologist or linguist. Sometimes it is enough to read good fiction from time to time, which in itself instills the skills of beautiful and rich speech. However, this process is slow and should be regular, and reading a large number of books is not always possible. So if you want to arrange for yourself an “intensive course” on pumping speech skills and not get bored at the same time, then you can turn to specialized books. I wish school textbooks were as informative and varied.
1. "The word is alive and dead" - Nora Gal
The book by translator Nora Gal was written more than 40 years ago, but over the past ten years it has been reprinted just a dozen times. It has not become outdated at all and even gained a new breath with the advent of the Internet, because all the principles of the “living word” have become relevant again.
To become a good translator, it is not enough to know a foreign language well, you also need to feel all the subtleties of your native language brilliantly. Nora Gal is an excellent translator, so all her advice on enriching our own speech is invaluable 40 years ago, and now, and 40 years later, will also come in handy (if we don’t all start speaking Chinese).
2. "From Adam's apple to the apple of discord" - Vadim Khrappa
Etymology is the study of the origin of words and expressions, and reading the usual etymological dictionary is rather boring. Vadim Khrappa kindly studied it instead of us and wrote a lot of interesting notes about how the most incomprehensible and intricate set expressions and phraseological units appeared. In addition, he devotes a lot of time to telling how to use them correctly and what mistakes can be made. If you accidentally change the preposition or ending, you blurt out something completely different.
3. "The Russian language is on the verge of a nervous breakdown" - Maxim Krongauz
Maxim Krongauz, being a linguist, closely follows the changes in the Russian language and tries to reconcile the Internet language and literate speech in accordance with all the rules. Unfortunately, his book Albany's Tutorial is a bit late. It was published when Albany slang was already in history. But “The Russian language on the verge of a nervous breakdown” will remain relevant for a long time, as it tells about the fundamental changes in the modern language, about the most common mistakes that already appear even in the media, and also about how to prevent the depletion of vocabulary in an era of simplification and speed of information delivery.
4. “Alive like life” - Korney Chukovsky
The Soviet writer Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky wrote not only famous poetic fairy tales for children, but also "popular non-fiction", although he himself would have condemned this term. “Live like life” appeared at a time when office work (the language of bureaucratic conversations and papers) began to dominate in the Russian language, and foreign words began to actively replace Russian counterparts. Now the situation with foreign words is exactly the same, but stationery and memorized phrases are still taught at school. So Chukovsky's book, even at an age, will help get rid of bad habits in the language.
5. "Russian with a dictionary" - Irina Levontina
Irina Levontina wrote her observations on changes in the Russian language for several years in the form of separate articles, and then published them as a separate collection. The book immediately became a bibliographic rarity and only a reissue can be purchased at an affordable price. This alone can speak of the quality and necessity of such notes. Irina, with humor and even some joy, welcomes the fact that the language does not stand still, but lives and changes. Unlike linguists of the old school, who are sad and every year claim that the language is getting poorer, Irina Levontina is convinced of the opposite. The main thing is to understand how to use all these new words and phrases, she argues, then speech will remain lively and rich.
6. How to talk to anyone, anytime, anywhere - Larry King
This book is not about the Russian language and not about speech as a linguistic phenomenon. And not even about the technique of speech or oratory. This is a unique experience of a person who wants to teach us to speak, and not to be silent, not to be shy and not to be hushed - while speaking beautifully, intelligently and well. For the Russian reader, the examples from the book are somewhat Americanized, but much can be adopted and used in everyday communication.
7. "Do we know Russian?" — Maria Aksenova
In fact, Maria Aksenova has a whole series of three books called “Do we know Russian?”, But if you like the first one, then you yourself will pay attention to the other two. The author takes a thread from the world and writes about all the interesting things from linguistics, philology, orthoepy and even journalism that are associated with the correct or incorrect use of language norms. As you can understand from the name, the main focus is on mistakes, and mistakes are most often funny or unexpected. The only negative that is often attributed to the author is the abundance of exclamation marks. What to do, she reacts very emotionally to mistakes in her beloved native language.
8. "The Strangeness of Our Language" - Nigel Brown
The book is called "The Strangeness of Our Language" and was written by an English-speaking author, but it's not about English at all. However, not about Russian either. Nigel Brown explores the appearance of borrowed words in other languages, and they almost always coincide in both Russian and English. So in "The Strangeness of Our Language" we act as citizens of the world, and at the same time find out where a huge number of words came from and whether they have changed their meaning over time.
9. "A word about words" - Lev Uspensky
Lev Uspensky wrote popular linguistic books for children and teenagers, but adults can also read him without feeling awkward or age-appropriate. “A Word about Words” is not his only informative book, so if it interests you, you can also pay attention to his works, in which he studies the appearance of street names, cities and nationalities, where he talks about names and surnames - that is, about unusual words. The same work can be taken as universal, since it takes a little bit from different areas and gives the broadest picture.
HOW TO INCREASE VOCABULARY
How much do you think Total words in Russian? I guess no one knows the exact answer. Even experts are able to name only the order, but not the exact number. According to some of them - about five hundred thousand words (three exclamation points suggest themselves here).
Some foreigners - philosophers and writers who knew our language well - claimed that the Russian language is one of the most expressive among European languages. “The Russian language, as far as I can judge of it, is the richest of all European dialects and seems purposely created to express the finest shades. Gifted with wonderful conciseness, combined with clarity, it is content with one word to convey thoughts when another language would need whole phrases," said Prosper Merimee. If the Russian language is the most expressive in Europe, then it is quite possible that it is the same all over the world.
It can be said that we are lucky in that from birth we have at our disposal such a powerful means of expression as the Russian language. We can be content to be able to describe our thoughts more accurately than other foreigners.
However, friends, even if we had in our vocabulary all half a million words of our great and mighty language, and even if we could manipulate them with extraordinary ease, then even in this case we would not be able to adequately reflect our thoughts in his speech. Why? Because thought is primary and language is secondary. A thought can have millions of shades, and with the help of language only a few of them can be conveyed. In one second, you can think about what requires many minutes of presentation. Therefore, no matter how rich the language is, it is not able to fully reflect all the subtleties of human thinking.
And if we take into account that the average citizen has not five hundred thousand, but, according to the estimates of some accountants, about three thousand words, then one can see the entire limitation of his expressive possibilities. The more words we have in stock, the more accurately and easily we will be able to express our thoughts in speech.
As you understand, the vocabulary of each of us is divided into passive(words we know but don't use) and active(words that we use in colloquial speech). Moreover, the passive vocabulary is an order of magnitude greater than the active one.
Our active vocabulary is very mobile - on the one hand, it grows, and on the other, it slowly melts. If a person has been sitting in solitary confinement for a long time and did not communicate with anyone, then after being released he will find that during the conversation he began to move his arms more actively, because. the developed tongue-tiedness makes him insert additional gestures instead of forgotten words. If you have studied a foreign language, you may have noticed that if the language is not practiced, then it is quickly forgotten. Therefore, in order to increase the vocabulary, it is necessary not only to accelerate the arrival of new ones, but also to slow down the process of forgetting the words already in the stock (forgetting does not mean the disappearance of words from memory forever, but the transition from an asset to a liability).
The growth of our vocabulary occurs throughout life at an average rate of one word per week. Not very fast. How to speed up this slow process?
Some methods for increasing active vocabulary:Communication(during a conversation, each participant replenishes his vocabulary from the interlocutor's arsenal - there is a word exchange between them);
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A lot has been said and written about how to increase vocabulary. Most educated people think about this regularly, even if their activities are not directly related to rhetoric or public speaking. The Russian language, rich and beautiful, allows people who speak it to express their thoughts expressively, elegantly and in a variety of ways. Good knowledge of the native language is a serious advantage in work, relationships, in any communications with others.
How to replenish your vocabulary, what methods and activities will be most effective? Let's try to figure it out.
Varieties of the lexicon
When we think about how to expand vocabulary, it is important to understand that, first of all, we are talking about increasing active vocabulary.
Active vocabulary - these are the words that we use in everyday life, communicating with friends, relatives, colleagues. We pronounce them easily and naturally, they are firmly embedded in speech and writing. We don't need much effort to find the right word.
Passive vocabulary is words whose meaning is generally clear and known to us, but we practically do not use them. Perhaps this is inappropriate in our social circle, or there are some other reasons. Then, in order to remember a word, we have to make some effort.
External vocabulary is highly specialized terms, the meaning of which we do not fully know. Usually these are words that are used in a professional environment, among a small circle of people.
As a rule, most people have a very limited active vocabulary: it's good if a hundredth of the total volume is used in speech. Therefore, when the question arises of how to replenish your vocabulary, this means that you first need to replenish the stock of constantly used words.
Learning to speak again
What do we do when we share our experiences with friends or call customer support and can't find the right name or accurately describe our emotions or feelings?
But we agreed that we would think about how to increase the vocabulary, right? Then we begin to develop awareness:
The recipe, in fact, is very simple: to learn how to speak beautifully, you need to ... speak. It's true. Learn to speak face-to-face. Tell stories, plots of books or films, news or impressions. Try to use new words that you haven't used before. Include them in your life consciously.
- Write letters
Written speech will also help to solve the problem of how to increase the number of words used. Write letters. Post on forums or social media. Try writing articles or essays. Keep a diary.
Carefully select words and phrases, look for synonyms - practice and practice is important in this matter.
- Make a speech
Public speaking and responsible conversations help to enrich speech very well. Make a sketch on paper in advance. Practice, look for different options that most accurately and fully reflect your point of view. If you have to speak in front of a large audience, make your speech bright and rich, rather than dull and unemotional.
- learn poetry
Learn by heart verses, retell texts. It is important not only to tell the text, but to do it as close as possible to the style of the author, paying attention to new words and phraseological units. Tell emotionally, with expression, then it will be easier to remember new words.
- Constantly replenish your active and passive vocabulary: both are important. Listen to audiobooks, solve crossword puzzles, watch useful educational programs and communicate with educated and developed people.
- To better remember a new word or turn of speech, create a vivid image, visualize it inside yourself. Words are well remembered in conjunction with others, in sentences, and not on their own.
- Write down your favorite quotes and expressions. Use them in your speech. The main thing is that it should be appropriate.
- Do not use slang words and swear words: approach the issue creatively, look for colorful bright replacements.
- Don't fill short-term memory with useless information.
- Learn a foreign language. Any. Oddly enough, this allows you to simultaneously replenish the active and passive vocabulary of the native language, too.
How to activate passive typing
Our passive vocabulary is constantly replenished. Basically, this happens in two cases: while we are listening and while we are reading. So its filling begins in childhood itself. Purposefully memorizing words does not make much sense: they will remain passive.
- Choose synonyms for words
Very well helps to activate the passive stock selection of synonyms. There is a whole series of interesting games when some phenomenon or object needs to be described in words, excluding the use of familiar and frequently used words from the list. You can arrange such games in a friendly company or work out alone.
It is useful to make lists of synonyms. For example, a dictionary of feelings. Write down all the feelings you know in a column and try to write as many synonyms as possible for them next to each other. Of course, it is important not only to write them, but also to use them in your spoken and written speech.
- Make up stories
Another useful and entertaining exercise: we compose a story using only nouns. Or verbs. Or - the most difficult - adjectives. Remember? "Night. The street. Lamp. Pharmacy". How can you continue?
Other options are also here: compose a story where words begin with each letter of the alphabet in order. Or all words with only one letter. It is important that the story is connected.
The phrase “I have no words” often has more than just an allegorical meaning. How often do we pronounce this phrase not at all when overwhelming emotions block the fountain of eloquence, but when it is really difficult to find exactly those words that convey a specific thought as accurately as possible! When the phrase "I have no words" comes up too often, you should consider expanding your vocabulary.
Vocabulary is denoted by the word "lexicon". This is not an "archive" where all the concepts and definitions that this or that person knows are stored. This is a collection of all the words that are in use by a certain group of people or a particular person.
Owning a vocabulary and using it are two different things. You can recognize words in text or speech without using them yourself. For this reason, the entire lexicon is conditionally divided into three groups.
Active vocabulary is the volume of words that a person regularly hears and uses without thinking, which a person uses constantly in everyday life, in ordinary life. An active vocabulary suggests that the use of the words that make up its composition does not require any mental effort, the need to remember the meaning or pronunciation.
Passive vocabulary - the whole range of words that are familiar and understandable when they occur in written or spoken language, but are not usually used. The word "reserve" best characterizes the meaning of the passive vocabulary. This is the "archive" from which a person, if necessary, can remember the word, fish out from the depths of the brain. The passive vocabulary is several times larger than the active one.
External vocabulary - a phrase from the area of passive vocabulary. The concept is operated mainly in psycholinguistics, when it is necessary to designate a circle of words unfamiliar to a particular person, any words that belong to narrow branches of human knowledge: scientific and professional terms, outdated vocabulary, and so on.
The differences between these different species are conditional, constantly changing with age, personality development, and changes in the external environment. Vocabulary increases especially strongly with age. The average first-grader constantly uses about two thousand words (which refers to the active vocabulary), by the end of school he is fluent in about five thousand words. Five to six thousand words is the average size of a person's active vocabulary.
Studying at a university allows you to double your vocabulary, of which half, and sometimes more, falls on the passive vocabulary: new special terms are firmly embedded in the head and are taken out of there only when necessary. Many scholars may know 50 thousand words, but in active use they still have the same 5-6 thousand.
How to expand vocabulary
The lexicon is greatly influenced by the field of activity, social circle, and living conditions. Vocabulary increases if you go beyond the boundaries of your environment, change your circle of friends, place of residence or work. An increase in the active vocabulary is useful for overall development. To increase the active vocabulary, you must follow the following recommendations developed by experts.
Communicate more. Both oral and written communication is important, because the lexicon is the tool of any communication. By developing the skill of communication, we unwittingly develop the tool itself. Two tricks work. We adopt new words from our interlocutors and ourselves try to use new words more often in order to convey information as accurately as possible. So the active vocabulary is replenished with words from the passive "archive".
The wider the circle of communication, the more diverse it is, the more words go from passive to active stock. Talk more with strangers, work colleagues, neighbors, casual acquaintances, fellow travelers. Correspondence, communication in social networks, chats and forums will enhance the effect of communication. Each new interlocutor should be perceived as a new source of words.
Read more. Not a better source of information, and hence the potential for vocabulary growth, than a written text. Depending on what words are missing in the lexicon, one should read classical literature or special reference books. The classics are good for enriching the vocabulary with words suitable for communication in any situation. Classical literature is a real treasure trove in order to replenish your vocabulary with lexical units, with the help of which you will not be ashamed to communicate with the queen. If it happens, of course.
Modern Russian prose makes it possible to replenish the vocabulary with modern slang. Reading pulp fiction from many lady writers, it is easy to expand the boundaries of the active vocabulary from Ellochka the cannibal thesaurus. A useful skill, considering how some modern ladies talk.
Science fiction will enrich the vocabulary for conversations with people from a near-scientific environment, or in order to easily impress inexperienced interlocutors with their "deep" knowledge of a scientific subject. To really understand any issue, or at least expand your vocabulary to communicate with really knowledgeable people, you should read scientific literature, specialized magazines and reference books.
To see real results, you need to read at least an hour daily. In this sense, reading works on the same principle as working out in the gym.
Reading aloud, pronunciation enhances the effect, promotes faster memorization of new words.
Listening carefully to interlocutors, or the radio, is another useful activity for expanding your active vocabulary. This is especially true for the so-called "audials" - people who best perceive and remember information by ear.
It is important not only to learn new words, but also to memorize them. And the best way to remember is to retell it yourself. It is necessary to retell everything that was read or heard, trying to keep the vocabulary of the source of information as close as possible. Many complain about "bad memory", but this problem is solvable. Trains memory memorization of verses. By the way, poems perfectly replenish vocabulary no worse, and sometimes better than prose.
An active vocabulary should not be limited to just one language. Knowledge of a foreign language allows you to significantly expand the boundaries of your native language. The Russian language contains about half a million words, about a tenth of which are borrowed from other languages. And if you also learn English, for example, you can significantly increase your vocabulary. There are about a quarter of a million words in the English language, and having a rich English thesaurus is almost twice as easy as Russian!
A good way to build up your active vocabulary is to keep a diary. This is a great alternative to correspondence with real people or an active life in social networks and forums. Experts note that this is not the most effective way to increase active vocabulary, but it works much better than nothing at all.
In ordinary life, many people treat crosswords, puzzles, crossword puzzles and other linguistic games with disdain. However, they perfectly train memory and allow you to expand your vocabulary.
Exercise to increase vocabulary
Sometimes you can do special exercises to increase your active vocabulary. For example, we are often too lazy to look for antonyms, we prefer to use the “not” particle. Not a warm summer, not a short road, not a systemic opposition... Straining our memory in search of antonyms, we will significantly expand our vocabulary. It is necessary to make it a rule to avoid the “not” particle wherever possible.
Reading often reveals words that are part of the passive vocabulary. To quickly translate these words into an active vocabulary, you should focus on these words throughout the text, pronouncing them in different phrases and sentences. So the language at the level of mechanics will remember the new word, and it will pop up involuntarily.
It is useful to memorize not only poems, but also dialogues in books or films, where the speech of the characters is replete with words from the passive vocabulary. Emotionally colored information is better remembered and then actively used.
