Quick Tips to Supercharge Your English Vocabulary | Podcast American English
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Hi, everybody. It's Curtis and Amy from realenglishconversations.com. Today, we're going to be talking about building vocabulary and one critical step that you might be missing that could be making this much more difficult for you. Exactly. A lot of the students, what they do is they have a list of words, for example. Maybe you use flashcards, but...

there's something that's missing. Even though you're reviewing those words every single day in that moment when you're speaking, for example, or you're trying to remember a word and you know that you're supposed to know it, but you can't recall it, this is the critical step and what we're going to be helping you with today.

Okay, let's get right into the core concept behind this technique. It's really to give yourself enough exposure to the language through repetition or use to help you to understand it through that context and remember it easier.

And when Curtis is explaining this, he's not talking about exposure like immigrating to an English-speaking country or just watching TV shows, for example, or listening to podcasts. There's actually a little bit more to this, and it's being more specific with deeper studying or revision of the content that you're being exposed to.

So we're going to start by giving you some pro tips here. And don't worry, we're going to give some examples of different activities that we do and point out how each of these activities relates back to this technique. So what's the first pro tip that you have, Curtis?

Okay, the first tip I want to discuss is putting a memory to that vocabulary. What I mean by this is you should be able to remember exactly where the vocabulary came from.

For example, you're reading a book in English and there's this moment in the book between the characters, what's happening with that moment. And with the vocabulary that you're learning, you can attach it to that context of that moment. Another example, it might be a scene in an English movie that you're watching.

The interesting scene with that interesting English, that is that moment that you want to remember where it came from. It might be an article that you're reading as well in English and what that article was about in that moment in time. If you attach it to that, you'll be able to have an easier time remembering vocabulary. And for the second tip, we're going to make sure that you have a support sentence and

Ideally, what you're going to be able to do is to extract the exact sentence where you heard that vocabulary or where you extracted it from. You want to use that particular sentence because combined with tip number one, where you have the memory so that you understand the context,

then you're also going to be able to have the sentence that you originally saw it in. In some cases, I like to have a couple of sentences so that I can see it not only from the source that I found it, but also another sentence that I think helps me to remember it. But when you have that sentence, you're never going to forget the context and you're going to know exactly where you should be using it.

And the last step is to only learn one meaning for the word.

English has multiple different meanings for different words. Stick with the one that you're learning in that context at the time. I know that it can seem like a shortcut where you learn a new vocabulary word or a phrase and you think, oh, cool, I can use this or learn the five different meanings of this word. But the problem with that strategy is that you don't have the context around the other meanings.

And additionally, you don't know if it's used in all of those different situations. In dictionaries, they like to list every possible use of the word, but usually only one or two, maybe three uses are really, really common. But as a student that's learning, it's impossible for you to know which ones are common. So make sure that you stick to the vocabulary requirements.

or the phrase that you learned in context with whatever you were studying, because that's going to help you to learn that word faster. Afterwards, you can worry about learning the other meanings as you're exposed to them.

Okay, so let's move on to demonstrating a couple of examples and how this advice that we've given for the first part of the lesson here, how it can relate to different activities that are really common. So Curtis, for you, you like learning with music because you're a music guy. Can you tell us what you do with music to learn vocabulary?

Okay, what I like to do is find a song that I really, really like. And what I try to do is find the lyrics with it as well.

And I try to understand those lyrics. Of course, I look up words that I don't know or don't understand. But I look at the context and what I really want to eventually end up doing is to sing along. This creates more practice of using that vocabulary and context. And it really...

in the meaning of the words and really the story behind the song sometimes too. And that actually leads us back to the core concept, right? Mm-hmm. Yes. Where you have repetition, practice, you're using it, you're... I mean, like, how many times do you have to listen to a song before you can sing along with it? Mm-hmm. Well, it depends on how easy it is, but... For me to commit a song memory, I mean, memorize it by heart...

almost, I don't know, a hundred times maybe. Oh, yeah. A lot. So you can imagine after that much repetition, that many times using the words, trying to sing along to hit the same rhythm, you know, it's not really the most efficient way maybe for building vocabulary, but fortunately you're practicing your speaking skills, you're improving your pronunciation and your intonation at the same time. So, I mean, if it's a fun way to learn and you enjoy it and you're learning vocabulary, it's good.

But the main point here that I want to go back to is that this reflects the core concept of what you need to do to be able to really learn vocabulary.

The second one that I want to talk about is just related to having private lessons or maybe group lessons, whatever you're doing to practice your English. I found personally that especially when last year I started to learn a little bit of Portuguese, I had to take a break. But at the time I was starting to learn Portuguese and I decided to jump right into private lessons as a beginner.

Because for me, this was a really great way to get a customized list of vocabulary that I absolutely needed in order to have some sort of basic conversation. And I don't know why, but for me, after I've used it,

in a conversation like that because the context was there. I knew what I was trying to talk about. I knew that I didn't have that word. The teacher gave me that word. I used that word in that moment. And later when I take that word and I put it

into my word list to be able to review, I feel like I'm 90% of the way there to be able to learn this vocabulary, to learn this word, for example, just because I've already put it into use and the context of the situation is so clear to me.

I think that that's a big part of it. So again, that goes back to that same core concept of having sufficient exposure and repetition or use to be able to really give you that clear understanding of the context. And later, it's just a little bit of memory work and boom, it's in your vocabulary. So Curtis, what about for people that are studying conversations like the podcasts that we have or our conversation lessons?

Our lessons are a great way to build vocabulary, common expressions, phrasal verbs, and idioms. Also, it's a great example for you to see how native speakers transition between thoughts and ideas in English. So for the first step, it's to look over, review, and read the transcript to extract all the new things

things that you want to put into your speaking and then put them into a document for review later. Okay, so now that you've gone through the transcription and extracted all the things that you wanted to put into your base of vocabulary, we're going to train your ears by listening to the audio. So how you'll do this is by listening to small pieces, small chunks, a couple of minutes of the audio until you understand close to 100%. And you'll want to put in as much detail to this activity as possible.

So with these techniques, it takes it right back to the same core concepts that we're learning about today. Let's talk a little bit now about how we're going to handle those words that are in our word lists or a flashcard deck that you've created for yourself.

So a couple of key points that I'm going to say here. Number one, I know that it seems really, really tempting to just study a word list that someone else has created because, you know, there are like 500 English words or 1000 English words and you don't need to do the work to be able to prepare those words and try to learn them. But if you think back to what our core technique is,

That idea is missing some of the important features. So for example, you're not going to have the context

You don't really know where that word came from. You don't have a way of connecting it with a memory. Oh, that came from this book. Oh, that came from this movie. Oh, this came from that English lesson, for example. And that's actually why this strategy doesn't work. It seems like a shortcut. It seems like, oh, cool, I can build my vocabulary quickly. But you're not going to be able to use that vocabulary actively. Right.

It's just going to be a lot harder to learn, use a lot more brain energy and you're doing it through rote memorization instead of through a more organic or authentic learning process that connects that vocabulary or those phrases to real things that relate to what you're doing.

So for example, for you, Curtis, when you're reviewing your flashcard list, is it a list that someone else created or what does that list have in it? The list is from vocabulary that I have created. I've created that list from...

Exactly. It's like a personalized list of the things that you have reviewed and learned from, right? Right. And I want to keep that fresh because studying new and fresh vocabulary is the best way to retain it.

Yeah, exactly. So you're not focusing on words from two or three months ago. It's okay. You've either learned them or not, but you're focusing on the most recent vocabulary, maybe in the last one, two or three weeks that you've picked up from somewhere.

But it's another last point about how to study those flashcards or that word list. I know that previously what I used to do is I would look at a card and I'd be like, hmm, I wonder what the answer is. And I couldn't remember it. So I would flip over the card and I'd go, oh, yeah, okay.

And then I'd look at the next card or the next item on the list and then look at the answer. Oh, yeah. Okay. And that process actually is totally missing this core concept that we're talking about, the core technique. Right. Because there's not enough thinking going on. So you're not like you're trying to remember it, but you don't have a way to remember it.

Okay, so when you're looking at that word, now what you're going to do, now that you understand the philosophy behind this and what you should be doing, you're going to be thinking, where did I see that word? And then what should happen is that movie scene should pop up in your head or the moment in the book that you extracted this from or whatever the article was about that you pulled this vocabulary or this phrase from, you're going to remember it.

That memory is going to help you to retrieve that vocabulary. But if you're still having trouble remembering that vocabulary, even though you know where it was from, you might have to do some further work to try to learn it a little bit more instead of being like, oh, yeah, that's the answer. This is the point where you really need to think you need to be like, hmm, how can I remember this word?

Maybe you're going to connect an image to it. Maybe you're going to break down the word. Like there's a funny example that Curtis and I talk about from way back when, when we were learning Spanish. One of the words he could not remember for the life of him was shed. And this isn't an important word. It's like a specific name for a building that you have a small building or like a storage area in the back of your house where you put your garden tools.

So anyway, what this one here is cobertizo. That's the word in Spanish.

The one that we learned anyway. And how did you remember that word, Curtis? Because you still remember it to this day, right? Yeah. I connected it to a late night talk show host. And what's his name? Stephen Colbert. Okay. So he now is visualizing Stephen Colbert because it's Colbertiso. So he's got the Colbert part. Okay. And then what happened with this guy? What was he doing? Okay.

He was hanging out in the shed. Okay. So he had this, Curtis was using this visualization of a talk show host hanging out in the shed. So when he was going through his words, for example, he would see shed and then he'd be like, Stephen Colbert. Ah, Colbert. And he was able to recall that word in that way.

So those are for words that you're really having a hard time learning or you feel like, wow, you know, I've looked at this word maybe 10 or 15 times and it's just not sticking. This is the point where you need to put more attention into it and try to apply some strategies to try to learn it a little bit harder. But just looking at that word and then looking at the answer, that is a very, very inefficient way of trying to get that vocabulary in your head.

Anyway, guys, that's all that we have for today's podcast. I hope that you found this lesson to be helpful.

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