Learning English Vocabulary

It is needless to mention the importance of English as a lingua franca of the world. Many people take the challenge to learn it either for academic or professional reasons. However, people always struggle to find out the best way to master English in a very short period of time. Their seek for a better way to learn English becomes more tedious than spending that effort in learning anything about the language. Being confused or even lost among different advertised ways to master English in the short term may make them give up the struggle. In this article, I will be more realistic towards learning English basing my argument on personal experience that was already based on some pieces of advice from my teachers.

One of the appropriate ways of learning English is to be familiar with it at the level of pronunciation. This means that the learner may have to spend some time just listening to English and get familiar with pronunciation patterns. It is not required from him/her to understand all that is listened to, but it is essential to recognize some sound patterns of that language. The essence of this way is to make the learner able to differentiate English from other languages he knows or even from his mother tongue. During this period of listening to English, the learner may have a lot of questions to ask and things to know. Those questions will become interesting when he moves to learn some vocabulary with their meaning and pronunciation. To the learner, leaning will be interesting when he discovers the written form and the meaning of some words he gets familiar with during the listening process. For that reason, many teachers and language researchers advise starting with the skill of listening and then reading.
Now comes the hard work. The learner has to collect as many vocabularies as possible. And this has to be done systematically so that we get fruitful results. There are plenty of recommended ways that would take pages to outline here, but the way that is the core point of this article is to consider language as a structural entity. To explain, each language has classes of words, theoretically known as parts of speech. Those parts of speech are the dam of vocabularies (lexicon) that are categorized and classified in parts when each part is detailed in terms of form and function. In addition to that, those words are handled in the language part of the brain and put together following a logic to produce a meaningful utterance. So, for the learner to have a good start is to memorize a number of words from each part of the speech. We already do that implicitly either with the mother tongue or with any foreign language. However, when the learner does the same while being aware of the process, he/she may feel the progress of learning the target language.
After collecting a good amount of vocabulary, the learner may move to study the logic that governs the orde and the function of those words in an utterance (grammar). And to start, the learner has to know that English has eight parts of speech (following the traditional grammar), and he/she has to memorize as many vocabularies as they can as it is a part of the process of leaning. They have to set a challenge of memorizing a specific number of words on a monthly or weekly basis, and then they will have to move to study grammar that governs the relationship of those words in a sentence or utterance.
In general, memorizing words is the hardest part of leaning. Still, there are some easy ways that help learners memorize easily. Those ways will be the subject of another article coming soon to this blog. Also, I will add articles explaining those parts of speech in detail.