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Viewing An Easy Way to Increase your Foreign Language VocabularyAn Easy Way to Increase your Foreign Language Vocabulary
By Kathy Steinemann
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If you have reached a point in your foreign language education where you feel like you are spinning your wheels, read on! Find out how to jumpstart your intellectual juices and get back on the road. It is so easy that you will wonder why you did not think of it yourself. Where and when are you most likely to need communication skills? The answer is simple: in your daily activities. Map out yesterday in your mind. With whom did you have conversations? What were the topics you discussed? Could you have conducted those conversations in the foreign language you are attempting to learn? Why not? The answer to this question is usually: a lack of vocabulary. It does not matter where you are in your learning process. You can be a beginning, intermediate, or advanced student. However, if you do not have a decent pool of words to draw from, you will never be able to make yourself understood. Forget about grammar. If you do not know the foreign language equivalent of 'telephone', you will never be able to say something like, 'Where is the nearest telephone?' Here is how to solve your problem. 1. Make a list of ten topics that you might need to talk about during a normal day. 2. Write the topics down on individual slips of paper and put them into some kind of container. 3. Every day, draw a topic out of the container and talk for one minute. Pretend that a national news network is interviewing you. Do not permit yourself to use any 'ums', 'ers', 'ehs', or 'ahs'. Think quickly and improvise, using words that you know. 4. If you do not know how to form future or past tense, substitute with a phrase that means something like, 'Next Friday I go shopping,' or 'Last Friday I go shopping'. The point is to converse in an understandable manner without awkward pauses. 5. After your one-minute talk, quickly jot down all the words you could have used if you knew them, and look them up in the dictionary. 6. As soon as possible, try a similar speech, incorporating the new words. Throughout the day, attempt to recall what you learned, and replay the speech in your mind. 7. Every day pick a new random topic. 8. After you have gone through the ten topics, increase your talks to two minutes, or develop ten more topics to work with. After you reach two minutes, see if you can stretch the time to three. Here are some questions that an interviewer might ask: • What do you eat for breakfast? Do you cook it yourself? • What do you do for a living? Do you find it enjoyable? • What is your favorite hobby? How much time do you devote to it? • Tell me about your family. Do you have a happy home life? • Where were you born? Did you grow up there? • Why are you attempting to learn a foreign language? Is it fun? • Who has been your biggest inspiration in life, and why? • Have you read any good books lately? Why - or why not? • Where do you do most of your shopping? Why? • What is your favorite TV series? Why? You will be amazed at how quickly you can increase your vocabulary with this method. Additionally, you will learn to think faster and apply grammatical concepts easier with each session. (c) Copyright Kathy Steinemann: This article is free to publish only if this copyright notice, the byline, and the author's note below (with active links) are included. About the Author: Kathy Steinemann is an author and webmaster who enjoys writing German-English short stories and poetry in parallel translation. More of her foreign language articles are available at A-Language-Guide. Article Source: A Language Guide - http://www.a-language-guide.com |
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