Make Vocabulary Fun
Becoming proficient with the spoken word is an invaluable skill that will help you in a wide number and variety of different aspects of life. Whether it is in the business sector or simply general conversation, an excellent grasp of the English language can prove to be a major plus. Successful communication is after all, the lubricant of success commercial transactions, and you would be amazed at the number of business personnel who end up making or walking away from a deal, purely on the basis of how articulate the speaker was.
Whenever confronted with the task of expanding and improving their vocabulary, many people groan inwardly and grit their teeth, assuming (like many scenarios in life, wrongly) that this will be a dull, tedious exercise that will involve learning mass volumes of data, by rote. They look towards their nearest English dictionary and simply balk at the idea of learning that weighty tome. The reality is that merely starting from the beginning of a dictionary and steadily working your way through is time consuming, laborious and for the most part, a misdirected attempt at learning.
The problem with improving your vocabulary by merely relying upon a dictionary is that you have to learn each and every single word by itself, with no help and no backup save for the rather academic and formal definition provided for within the dictionary itself. What this means then is that the would be student learns a whole bunch of words (and devotes a significant amount of time to do so)without actually having any sort of real or appreciable understanding as to what the different words mean.
Learning from a dictionary is a totally sterile exercise, because there is simply no context, or pictures. Being able to break down words into related groups or themes is a very excellent way to study new vocabulary and quickly, because it means that you automatically have a mental starting point from which you can reference from.
Another reason why learning by rote from the dictionary is not an effective method for improving your vocabulary is that it is not a method that is best suited for everyone. Everyone will learn at a different pace, with some methods being more effective, whilst other being less effective. Children especially will struggle to maintain the level of concentration required to actually succeed using this method.
If you are trying to improve a child’s English vocabulary then you should try making a game of it, be it by using flash cards or by making simple rhymes out of words in order to help maintain their concentration.