Mastering vocabulary matters: Building a strong English vocabulary aids success in competitive exams and professional life

Patna: Mastering English vocabulary opens the door to success—from cracking various competitive exams like CAT, CLAT, CDS, NDA, SSC, IBPS and UPSC to excelling in interviews and professional life.

You don’t need an extraordinary memory to build a good vocabulary. Just make smart strategies and steady efforts, and you will have one. Lists of words should not be memorised. A word learnt without its usage is forgotten soon. Words should be learnt in context through novels, stories, articles, news bulletins, blogs and podcasts. Observing a word used in a sentence makes us understand its “flavour” and how it interacts with other words, this is technically called collocation.

The Dos

Read diversely. Do not just stick to the textbooks. Exposure to different styles of writing introduces one to different “registers” of English, which is situation or group specific vocabulary.

Use a Learner’s Dictionary, like Oxford, Collins and Cambridge.

Maintain a personal journal: Whenever you find a new word, write it down. Add its meaning, a synonym (a word with a similar meaning), and your own original sentence.

Using a thesaurus is also very helpful.

Learn roots, prefixes, and suffixes. For instance knowing “chrono” means time makes it easy to understand and remember chronology, chronicle etc.

Practice active recall: Try to use at least three new words in daily conversations or school essays every day.

The Don’ts

Don’t cram word-lists, avoid rote learning. Learning 50 words overnight is futile, instead plan and execute a schedule of five to 10 words a day.

Don’t be afraid of mistakes, many students hesitate to speak English or use new words.

A sophisticated word should be used only if the context requires it. If a simple word suffices, use it.

Try to begin “thinking” in English as translation often loses the intricate nuances of the language.

Building vocabulary is running a marathon, not a sprint. Start today by looking around you and naming everything you see in English. Listen to English news for 10 minutes. Small, consistent steps will eventually lead to desired results.

(The writer Naqui Ahmad John is an assistant professor of English in Patna University)