Lots of students have complained that “I kept forgetting vocabulary after years of learning”, or “Are there any ways to learn words quickly and remember them?” Today, I will share some useful tips with all of you.
1. Do not learn words individually: Some students still have that old-fashioned habit of learning words along with their accompanied meaning, and that has got to stop. You should learn them in paragraphs, articles, books, newspapers, and so on; in short, learning based on the contexts.
2. Learn by collocations: The unique point about English is that there are a lot of collocations, for example, ‘take a break’, ‘have coffee’, … You should remember words through their collocations and make sentences with them.
3. Use all of your senses in learning: Instead of just simply writing new words, it is advisable that you check the pronunciation and then speak them out loud before writing them. We can remember the words longer accordingly. Repeating words numerous times every single day will not be as effective as doing it several times periodically, like for a few days or a few weeks.
4. Use mind maps: It is a very useful way to learn new words. With colorful images and diagrams, it will help the brain connect messages together. Thus, this makes the memorizing process much easier. For instance, with the topic of housing, we can divide the house into rooms and put items into each of them or divide the two columns of healthy and unhealthy food when it comes to the food topic.
5. Drawing: If you are a more visual learner, try to draw pictures to eradicate all the pressure, enhance your creativity, and enlarge your vocabulary range. For example, when you learn a new word, you could draw a picture related to the word and remember its meaning. On the contrary, if you are not good at drawing, you could print or hang a related picture found via Google on the wall to serve the purpose.
Hopefully, those tips will help you achieve that goal. Let’s use them as references and try to apply them as soon as possible.
GV Phạm Thị Ngoan
SV Bùi Nguyễn Minh Tuấn