Vocab Notebook

Well as we all know learning vocabulary is on of the most important aspects of a language learner. In order to improve my vocabulary I have tried many different ways and figured out what works the best for me.

The first useful tactic to learn vocabulary I used, I presume all of you did, is the Porter Book. I did all the exercises from unit one to unit six. I looked up every single vocab that was unfamiliar to me and wrote it down in my "Vocab Notebook". Moreover I wrote out specific collocations and example sentences.

I used two tactic of writing important words out. The first was writing everything down manually in my vocab book.

This, however turned out to be very time consuming. This gave me idea of writing everything down in a word document on my laptop. It turned out to be the perfect solution because I have my laptop always with me and I am able to revise the vocabulary on the go. 

Another useful help I discovered is an application for smart-phones. It is called gFlash+ which makes it possible to turn a google spreadsheet with your vocabulary into small and handy flashcards on your phone. This is an even better way to learn and revise vocabulary whenever and wherever you want because one thing you will never forget to take along when walking out of the house is your phone,

Vocab Notebook 2

So, my method for learning the great number of words for the second PC actually changed a little bit. For the first PC I created a word doc and wrote all the vocabulary in a spreadsheet. I discovered that I memorize unfamiliar words better when I write them down in my book, so I did this. There were about 400 vocabulary in total so, in order to manage writing all those out, I already started to do so during Christmas break. I worked with four different websites that helped me out a great deal: Vocabulary.com, Oxforddictionaries.com, Thesaurus.com and Howjsay.com. I wrote down every single unfamiliar word in my vocab book along with its explanation, synonyms, antonyms and some example sentences too. I also used the vocab list on Vocabulary.com, as it enables me to test myself whether I learned something or not. I focused on the 'hard' words first, as they are the more tricky ones. As the pronunciation of those words where extremely important for this part of the PC, I actually studied the phonetic alphabet and wrote every single word I wasn't sure of how to pronounce in phonetic script. I also worked with the "spelling bee" on Vocabulary.com, to make sure that I memorized the pronunciation. Unfortunately I could not save my progress with the spelling bee on Vocabulary.com so I had to start over and over again, which was a little bit annoying. All in all, I will definitely continue to write vocabulary down as my experience has appeared to be the best way of memorizing unfamiliar words.