Image Credit: http://academicwrite.blogspot.com/2014/04/building-your-vocabulary.html
Vocabulary is all over your daily life – in newspapers, magazines, books, TV shows and even in movie subtitles. Therefore, when you have more vocabulary stored in your memory, you can discern many more words. Today, I will show you two strategies to learn new words.
(if you’re asking, “What does discern mean?” in the paragraph, I encourage you to use prior knowledge! After that you can search it up)
Part I: Strategies
Here are two strategies to improve your vocab building:
- Use context. Context is basically using the words around the unknown word to guess what the meaning is. Let’s look at an example:
The fashion show featured many ostentatious parrots including Einstein and Fluffy.
Well, we might think, “What does ‘ostentatious’ mean?” That is the unknown word we are trying to figure out. Looking at the words around it, we know that the parrots are in a fashion show. But if we want to know what the parrots are described as, you can describe them as “showy” or “decorated” since they are in a fashion show.
If we look at the definition of ostentatious online, Google tells us that “ostentatious” means “extremely decorative” or “designed to impress”. Therefore our guess was right.
Practice problem: Guess the unknown word using context:
The orchestra did not appeal to the extremely fickle conductor, who kept stopping at little parts.
- Latin/Greek roots. We can figure out the meaning of a word using our knowledge of Latin/Greek roots.
Example:
George had arachnophobia in his late twenties.
Our unknown word is the word “arachnophobia”. We immediately see that “-phobia” is a Greek suffix which means “fear”. And “arach-” is a prefix for “spiders”. This means that George is extremely afraid of spiders in his late twenties.
Practice problem: Using your knowledge of prefixes/suffixes, guess the meaning of the bolded word below.
We all live in the biosphere, no matter if it is an insect or a human or a cheetah.
I hope you enjoyed this article, and be sure to practice these two strategies very often! Good luck to your vocabulary building!