One repeated comment I continue to hear from students is “I need to improve my vocabulary because I don’t understand many words I hear, and I can’t express myself sometimes”. This comment is then usually always followed by “How can I increase my vocabulary better?”. When I ask students why they seem to have difficulty in building their vocabulary they usually always say “I can’t remember the new words that I learn,- I tend to forget them very quickly”. OK,.. the first thing I’d like to say about this is “don’t worry”,. it’s a common problem which I have a very simple and effective solution for:

Focus on the words that suit your own life experience
Firstly, it’s important to realize that it’s best to focus on vocabulary words that are going to be relevant to your own type of conversations. For instance, you may be working in a particular job, industry or profession that requires you to know a particular type of vocabulary. However, initially its best to focus on nouns and adjectives that will help you to express yourself in simple daily English terms. The single most common problem I hear reported from students is that they have difficulty remembering words. When I ask students how they go about learning new vocabulary they all tell they use a similar method. That method is the very thing that stops them from really effectively learning new vocabulary. They take a bunch of words (usually 6 to 10 words) and then they repeat them several times over after looking up the meaning, and they hope to remember them by repeating them this way. The problem is that they will be lucky if they can remember even one word like this because it’s way too confusing and the method lacks any substance. The result is that they have difficulty recalling new words and this leads to increasing frustration.

The proven method that works
Firstly, you shouldn’t try to learn more than 2 or 3 new words per day. Anymore than that is likely to create confusion. The method to use is one of firstly identifying a word that you think could be useful that you need to learn. Then take that word and put it into a sentence and repeat the sentence several times over. The reason that this method works is that it’s easier to remember a sentence that has meaning than it is to remember a word that does not. For example let’s say that the new word is “consider“, then you’d just make up a sentence such as “To think is to consider”; actually, that’s more of a phrase than a sentence, and that’s a good thing because it’s easier to remember. If you do this with 2 or 3 words daily (you can try more if you have a good memory and if this method is easy for you), then at the end of the day just repeat the sentences a couple of times over before you go to bed and then leave them to sink into your subconscious mind as you sleep. At the end of the week you’ll have 15 to 20 new words that you can review in less than 15 minutes just so that they remain fresh in your mind. Furthermore, at the end of each month you can take 30 to 40 minutes to review all of the vocabulary word sentences that you’ve created (they’ll be around 60 to 80 of these if you’ve been learning 2 - 3 new words daily) and that way they’ll be firmly set in your mind like cement.  This is a very simple and effective way to build your new vocabulary, and if you employ this method then you’ll add 700 to 1000 new words to your vocabulary every 12 months, - that’s powerful!