An Effective Strategy in Mastering English Vocabularies

Is Making A Vocabulary List Effective in Mastering English Vocabulary?

For instance:
No----------English----------Indonesian

1.------------Interest----------Tertarik
2.---------Look forward-----Menanti-nanti
3.-------------Suffer-----------Menderita
4.------------Get out----------Keluar

Mastering English vocabularies with listing the words as the presented table above is absolutely not useful. Why could it be? It is obviously correct that with making English vocabulary list as the displayed table, it can facilitate us to quickly recognize and master lots of English words. Even an English learner who has an excellent intelligence could probably memorize 30 words per day as he applies vocabulary list technique. However, this case is far from the targeted effectiveness because there is a reasonable possibility that he can make mistakes while he is using learned words in utterances. An English word will not convey the meaning if it is used in a wrong context. The most wonderful way which should be implemented by us in mastering English vocabularies is as the following three steps: 1. Previously recognizing the characteristic of English vocabulary, 2. Understanding in detail about grammatical aspects related to each English word being learned, 3. Grasping the context when the words learned can be used.

1. Previously recognizing the characteristic of English vocabulary

While mastering English vocabulary, it is necessary for us to know that most of English words have their own pairs. This concept is generally called as “collocation”. Only few English words must be recognized individually such as the words related to names of persons and places, several particular technical terms, and kinds of abbreviation which is in general known to represent something. Therefore when we encounter a new English word, we have to anticipate its pair and the pair itself is usually found in the form of preposition, noun, and etc. With understanding the characteristics of English vocabularies, automatically we have obtained a basic strategy in mastering English vocabularies in which we should directly learn English vocabularies in the form of phrases, clauses, or even sentences, and avoid learning word for word. With applying this significant strategy, all at once we will acquire the nature of English word usages.

2. Recognizing grammatical aspects related to each word learned

The subsequent point which has to be anticipated is grammatical substances of the words learned. Here some considerations are needed. We need to precisely know the word class, then we also have to analyze the possible change of the word class, or in addition it is renowned with the term “derivational and inflectional morphology”. Besides, it also includes phonological aspects because the sounds of English words possess special rules which are also classified into grammatical contents. It can be concluded that we have to also ascertain correct and acceptable sounds of English words to be habituated while learning English vocabulary. There are lots of on-line English dictionaries having pronunciation records to help access our needed words which we can rely on while learning. One more point we have got about this case is that when we are in the process of mastering English vocabularies, it is required to continuously grasp grammatical substances of the words.

3. Grasping the context when the words learned can be used.

The last point required to consider is to understand when a word can be used. Recognizing the context really determines the quality of English word usages into sentences. To start by undertaking this step, we need several important references which could be a criterion for the correctness of grasping the word contexts. It is necessary for us to employ monolingual dictionaries which are internationally admitted accurate such OXFORD English learners Dictionary, Cambridge English Dictionary, and etc. Such these dictionaries provide accurate English corpora as the example section of words learned. The other resource can be such an internationally useful website on this link /www.corpus.byu.edu/ which also furnishes lots of English corpora. With understanding the word contexts as English native speakers use, we will be guaranteed for the accuracy of English vocabulary mastery.

At last, mastering English vocabularies has to really be undertaken step by step and in routine due to lots of other aspects related to the words which need to be considered in order to obtain accurate mastery. Therefore, mastering English vocabularies with only rely on listing-word-strategy is probably considered ineffective and could impact on making mistakes.