Vocabulary

The first point that most of my students raise is almost invariably on vocabulary:

• “My English vocabulary is poor.”
• “I need to improve my vocabulary.”
• “I can’t speak fluently because I don’t have the vocabulary”.

I’m often asked ‘How can I improve my vocabulary?’ Off the cuff I can rattle away a few things you can do to improve your vocabulary bank:

Read a lot, keep a dictionary or thesaurus with you every time, learn at least 5 words a day (why 5, I don’t know), play games like scrabble, boggle, jumble, and crosswords, chat a lot in English, use the new words when you chat, keep a journal.

Well, the list is endless.

Now, this makes it easy and fun to learn new words. But what happens often is you don’t remember those new words when you want to. Then, you pause half way through your conversation, trying to recall that word. When you don’t get it, you panic and end up translating from your first language. And if at all you do remember, you find that you cannot use them to make any kind of sense.

All the while, your poor listener’s completely lost with no idea what you’re talking about.

Another problem is how to use the new words you learnt when you chat. You will need to turn your conversation in that direction artificially. And that makes it boring for your listener. And, it doesn’t improve your fluency or confidence in English either.

Think of this: One of my students once said this to me: ‘I don’t have the celerity in my English’. What he meant was he wasn’t fluent in English.

I didn’t know why he even wanted to use that weird word. Then I realised he was studying for CAT and was busy learning words by heart.

Okay. I’ll let you in on a BIG secret—do not kill yourself over vocabulary. Your vocabulary is mostly related to your profession. So, a doctor will have a different set of vocabulary than a lawyer, for instance. But the remaining vocabulary will be taught in the class. Another point here: vocabulary forms a very small fraction of your communication. A huge part is your body language and voice quality. Then you also have the structures.

Your English course is so structured that you learn both vocabulary and structures together. They are so related that when you use the structure, you also remember the vocabulary. That increases the fluency of your spoken English.

Similarly, for the communication skills courses, like presentation skills or interview skills, and so on, you don’t need to learn new vocabulary the hard way around.

So, don’t bother too much about improving the vocabulary.