How To Improve Your English Vocabulary: 3 Proven Strategies!

English is swiftly heading towards becoming the universal language. It is the official language of over 70 countries and English-speaking nations are responsible for around 40% of the total GNP of the world. 

If you’re not very familiar with English, you might lag behind in your personal as well as professional life. You might fail in several competitive exams and lose various job opportunities if you aren’t well-versed in the English language. You don’t have to become a PhD-level English Harvard professor, but you should at least have a basic understanding of the fundamentals of English communication. 

Learning English does become an arduous task if you aren’t aware of the right strategies to learn and boost your English acumen.

A rich vocabulary holds significant value as it is the indication of apt communication and an extensive knowledge base. So to improve your vocabulary and eventually your perception, we’ve compiled three powerful and proven strategies that’ll take your vocabulary to the next level. These simple strategies mentioned in this post will surely aid you in growing personally as well as professionally. 

Strategy 1: Think In English

Do you know why you are so convenient in communicating in your mother tongue? 

One of the prime reasons for this is that you almost always think in your native language. Our brain is conditioned to think about stuff and translate these thoughts into words almost immediately. But this process becomes a bit strenuous and slow when it comes to English. In order to convert our thoughts into English words (both speech and written), we need time and the grip of the right words at the same time. This can easily be resolved by getting into the habit of ‘Thinking in English’. 

Thinking in English will be a little hard in the beginning, but once you become adroit with the flow of the words and framing sentences, learning new words and incorporating them into day-to-day conversations is certainly quite easy. 

Thinking in English helps you adapt your thoughts to English and eventually reduce the time span required to convert thoughts into words. It further helps you conveniently express your thoughts in English, which is your ultimate anticipated goal. This strategy definitely works wonders and hence you should inculcate the habit of thinking in English. 

Strategy 2: Watch Movies and Listen to Song Lyrics

Almost all of us love movies, music, or even both. But people rarely look at them as a medium to learn something and amplify their skill sets. Movies and music, both of them can be used to enrich vocabulary as they provide an abundance of words. 

Watching Movies to Improve Vocabulary:

Watching English movies is perhaps one of the easiest and most entertaining ways to improve vocabulary. While watching movies, you can turn on the subtitles of the movie and pay heed to them. While the actors use those words in their respective scenes, you’ll understand the meaning of those words effortlessly. You’ll also understand how they use particular words with a particular tone to emphasize something. Once you understand these words, you can make it a norm to implement them in your routine life and as a result, you’ll upgrade your thesaurus. 

Listening to Music to Improve Vocabulary:

Listening to English songs is a similar way to expand your glossary. Listening to music is a very easy habit to build and when you listen to English music, you hear the daily language of the English natives and colloquial speech. This makes you pick up not only the vocabulary but also the pronunciation and the sentence constructions in the English language. Another great edge you have while listening to English songs is that you don’t have to put aside hours in order to listen to songs and learn English. 

Strategy 3: Don’t Just Learn Words, Use Them

People often say that ‘Knowledge is Power’. But this statement is probably a fallacy. The correct paraphrased statement should apparently be ‘Applied Knowledge is Power’. One of the most common practices that amateur English learners undertake is that they write a few words from a dictionary and memorize them in the hope of improving their thesaurus. Most of the time, this doesn’t work because they are learning something that they have not planned to implement. 

A person cannot learn to swim by reading or writing about swimming. The person has to get into the water and move their limbs in certain patterns to learn swimming and it takes practice. 

The same goes for learning new and diverse words. You just can’t write down the words with their meaning and expect them to penetrate into your glossary. One of the best ways to add new words into your vocabulary is to actually use them. You can write a sentence, a paragraph, or even a short blog to see if you are really capable of implementing what you’re learning. This practice will make you immensely skillful in learning new words and putting them into use. 

Bonus: 

Hang around with people who wish to improve their vocabulary as well.

This is yet another effective method to strengthen your vocabulary. Nothing can stop a group of people who are on a mission to achieve something viz. A rich vocabulary in this case. If you are in an ecosystem where people are driven to enhance their glossaries, you’ll get into a similar flow and achieve similar results. 

Building a good vocabulary is neither as hard as it seems nor as easy as it sounds. Everything depends on how well you are executing the strategies. Just reading this blog isn’t going to help. But actually executing the strategies would unquestionably help you in regards to your vocabulary amplification. A great vocabulary would lead to a better grasp of the English language and would help you in several ways in your personal as well as professional life in the near future. 

We hope even this post has contributed in some way to nurturing your vocabulary. If it did, then share it with someone who must read it and help the person boost his or her vocabulary as well…!!