G'day, how are you doing mate? Are you learning English vocabulary at the moment? If you're not learning it in a proper way, it's going to be a significant waste of time. How should we learn, by the way? Without further ado, let's get underway.
- Do not just "anki" (=memorise) the whole example sentences from your vocabulary book or text.
- Do not just learn English words from an English-Japanese dictionary.
- Do not just learn English words from their spellings.
In terms of the first one, "Anki" is somehow one of the important things to do in the course of learning English. However, just memorising the given example sentences won't really help you enhance your English skills. Of course, I'm not saying it's completely a waste of time, but instead of doing "anki", what you should be doing is to understand basic definitions of the word and how it is used in a various sentence structure. So, you just need to get the most out of different sentence structures in order to get used to new words effectively and efficiently. Just memorised sentences are prone to be useless when it comes to practicality, precisely because I think you are highly unlikely to use the sentence in a real conversation due to having not much flexibility. So, you don't need to memorise anything at all at this stage. Memorising the word now is less important than how often you see the word, which is far more important than forceful memorisation.
Next up, looking up a word in an English-Japanese dictionary isn't really good way of increasing your vocabulary. Of course, sometimes it helps somehow, but mostly Japanese translation, interpretations as well as impractical example sentences have an adverse effect on learning vocabulary. In all probability, you will end up remembering the meanings in Japanese rather than English. So, this creates a Japanese way of thinking, right? In fact, direct/literal translation does not really make sense. Instead of using an English- Japanese dictionary, an English-English one has to be consulted. Normally a good quality English-English dictionary tends to explain the definitions and example sentences in a very lucid and simple way, so I don't think you cannot read and understand unless you have no knowledge about the English language. You should definitely try!
Last but not least, learning English words from just their spellings are also terrible, because you won't know how they should be pronounced, right? Yes, of course, spellings are very important to be able to write English sentences without errors. However, when it comes to speaking and listening in particular, knowing just spellings do not help you boost your practical skills. That is to say, pronunciation comes first. More specifically, you've got to understand the relationship between spellings and pronunciation. There are heaps of typical patterns when it comes to this relationship. This cannot be learnt from listening to native speaker's recordings. So improving listening skills is not possible without knowing this relationship. Even if you could hear what to be heard, you won't be able to figure it out exactly what to be said as you don't really understand phonemic sounds, nor can you pronounce them. So, what you should be doing is to learn phonemic symbols, practise them until you've reconciled the gap between your pronunciation and standard native one. Once you've reached at a certain level, then off you go mate.
In conclusion, learning English vocabulary is the lifetime study for everyone as there're astronomical numbers out there, right? But, the more you know the above proper method, the faster you'll be able to increase the number of vocabulary. Do learn it from scratch if you have learnt in a wrong way. Never too late to learn!
Thanks for reading my blog. Chao!