How to increase your vocabulary

Do you remember when as a child you learned thousands of words using flipcards and duolingo?? Well of course not, this isn't how you learned your native language. You learned by listening and reading a huge amounts of material.

Still many people try to learn foreign languages in a very different way: by consciously memorizing word lists using flashcards and online applications. No wonder this doesn't deliver leading to frustration and self-doubt.In what follows, I will take for granted that learning a foreign language works in fundamentally the same as learning a native language when it comes to vocabulary acquisition and see what follows from this.

1. Stay patient especially if you are a beginner

If you have a baby in the family reflect on how long it actually takes to learn the basics. This is the slowest part of learning a language. Of course as a grown up you have a huge head start by comparison to a baby, but it still takes time to get to learn the basics.

It is much harder to do learn words as long as you are at the beginner level: you can't understand much in your target language and you aren't used to how it sounds or looks. The journey to the completion of A2 is in manyways the hardest part of learning a new language.

2. Unconcious learning comes first

As mentioned earlier, the best evidence for this is the way you learned your native language. You know a huge amount of words (between 15 and 20.000 according to the BBC) but you did this without deliberately memorizing word lists. You did it through absorbing huge amounts of material in your native language.

Just consider for a moment how much practice you'll need with flashcards to get your vocabulary to the 700 words that you need for A1 (this number is given here and here). Something better has to be in place.

But the worst part is that studying the language in such a mechanistic doesn't really bring you in contact with it. Assume you know your 700 words in your target language: to say something as simple as "I want to buy bread" you have to also know a lot about word order, verb declension, prepositions etc. Just putting the words together won't do.

3. Quantity

If you accept 2, we are done with the myth that you'll spend a few months with flashcard and be done with vocabulary. It just follows that in this new scenario quantity is extremely important. Learning through exposure to material takes time.

You will have to come across the same word many times and in different situations. Re-reading of already familiar texts can also be very helpful.

4. Learn how to guess

It's a skill like others. Learners often focus too much on what they don't understand. Guessing however involves examining closely what you do understand to get clues. This is why context and combining information matters so much. Which brings us to the next point ...

5. Context

Context helps you to guess. Think of the acting in a movie or the images in a comic book. My parents were resentful when as a child I prefered comic books over books to spend my time reading, but my vocabulary didn't suffer as a result - if anything this kind of reading makes lots of sense for young children and so it does for people who learn a foreign language.

Similarly, don't try to learn words in isolation (eg with flashcards), words that are part of a story work much better. 

6. Deliberate effort still works for some things

Collocations like "call it a day" or "a call for action" are very hard to get through guessing even for advanced learners. In this case, it might be best to make a conscious effort and look them up in the dictionary. 

One of the best sources on vocabulary learning is this 1999 article by Thomas Huckin and James Coady.