Increasing English vocabulary and reading

The fastest way to increase English vocabulary is to read. If you can then listen to what you have read, so much the better. It will reinforce your memory of what you read, and improve your reading rhythm and speed.

There are problems, however. It is not pleasant to read material with more than 5% new words. But to increase vocabulary you need to discover new words in interesting contexts. Consulting a traditional dictionary is hopeless because it is so time consuming and the words so quickly forgotten. Reading on line is better because you can consult an electronic dictionary but the words are still quickly forgotten. It is also easier to read a book than to read online.

If you are lucky you can find special graded readers with prepared word lists. Even with a prepared word list, all too often it seems that the editors of these readers deliberately provide translations of obvious words that you already know and do not provide translations of difficult new words that you do not know.

We think the The Linguist is an excellent solution since members can use the content in our library which self-grades to their invidual vocabulary level. They can also import any content they like, and build their own vocabulary databases and use our vocabulary learning methodology.

Whatever you do, you canot avoid reading a lot if you want to master lots of vocabulary.

The champion word learner at The Linguist is one of our members from Japan, Sada...  Matsu..... He has been with The Linguist since Oct 30 2005, in other words over two years. I see him on the site almost every day. In about 27 months he has saved 11,3999 words and 3882 phrases. He has studied 809 items, of which 299 are from The Linguist Library and 510 are imported from elsewhere. He listens 1-2 hours per day. ( He actually records his listening hours!) His total known words is 26,419. He never writes. He never participates on any Skype discussions. He just reads and listens, just about every day.

Ai, go for your goal of 20,000 words! But I am glad you are also going to join us on the Vox blog and hopefully join some discussions as well.