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How to build & expand your vocabulary - 4 useful steps for improvement

Hello, everyone. And welcome back to English With Lucy.

Don’t worry, guys. It is me this time. Not my weird Lucy replica in the form of Allie for a proper teach me. That was a lot of fun.

I’m glad you liked it. The response was honestly hilarious. I had a blast. So who has been with me since the very beginning of English With Lucy? Not that many people. I had, well, I had very few. It took me a couple of months to get to 1000 subscribers. But my second ever video was a video called How to Learn and Remember Vocabulary. The video’s a little bit disorganised. It was my second video ever. I was 21 years old, and I was eager to get onto You Tube and share this knowledge that I had.

But the video’s done really, really well, but looking back at the video, there are some updates that I would like to add on because that teaches you how to learn and remember vocabulary. It’s a great method. But it doesn’t teach you how to expand and widen your vocabulary, which is something that could benefit basically everyone. I want to expand my vocabulary in my mother tongue, my native language, which is English.

And I also want to expand my vocabulary in my second and third languages, Spanish and Italian. And maybe even Portuguese. If you haven’t seen my video about Portuguese yet, check up there.

Yeah, so this is a video that will be useful for both native speakers and non-native speakers. I want to share with you some tips that I’ve picked up, some pieces of advice, but it’s not going to be your typical How to Improve Your Vocabulary video.

Oh, read books. Oh, watch films. I want to give you some tips that are really, really gonna help that you might not have thought of before. So bear with me.

So, my first tip is don’t get overwhelmed. When I think I want to expand my vocabulary, I feel overwhelmed. I just think, oh my god. There are so many words. And there are so many words that I’m lacking in my vocabulary. How on earth am I going to learn them all? You need to realise that it’s not humanly possible to swallow and regurgitate the full Oxford Dictionary unless you have a fabulous gag reflex. Joke.

I’ve seen a couple of comments on some of my videos from people saying, “I like to read the dictionary before I go to bed,” which if your mind is capable of doing that and you can read a little bit of the dictionary each day and take in, wow! I take my hat off to you because that’s really, really impressive amount of dedication you have there. I personally cannot do that. So I recommend that you chunk your vocabulary learning into three sections, and you focus your time and energy and effort into learning the vocabulary from these three sections. It’s not as complicated as it sounds.

Section one, topics you are interested in. I am interested in gardening, so I like to watch gardening videos, and I have picked up loads and loads and loads of vocabulary, especially Latin terms actually for plants, just through watching videos and doing research and reading books.

So yes, reading books, watching films, watching videos is a great technique. Make sure you’re focusing, so you’re choosing a video that will help you expand your vocabulary and you’re absorbing it, and then you’re applying what you learned in my previous video, How to Learn and Remember Vocabulary. Basically, you’re keeping a vocabulary diary, and you’re being really, really aware and meticulous about words that you don’t know already. Don’t let anything slide.

If you don’t know that word, you find out what it means, and you write it down in your phone or in a book. It doesn’t matter. Just make sure you are meticulous. Section number two, vocabulary that you use and come across on a daily basis. Now why do I say use and come across? There’s two different parts of vocabulary expansion. There’s seeing a word that you don’t know, and learning what it means. But there’s also taking words you already know, and finding alternative ways of saying them. Synonyms, for example. So it’s really, really useful to look into synonyms.

There may be words that you’re using every single day. For me, a bit of a problem is the word like. So you’re your using some words every day all day. Like the word like, for example. Like the word like. And you will sound much more eloquent if you find alternatives, and you switch between the alternatives. Words that you come across on a daily basis, things in the news, political terms. If it’s, you know, for example when the Brexit was going on, I learnt loads of political vocabulary because I was coming across the terms on a daily basis. I was reading the newspaper.

I was watching the news. I was very conscious of the fact that I didn’t totally understand what was going on, so I made myself understand, both on a political level and a vocabulary level. And section number three, my favourite section, random spontaneous randomness is, you know, where you sit down and you think, “I wonder what that extra toe on the back “of a dog’s leg that doesn’t work is called.” Your brain wanders.

Use it to your advantage. Use it to improve your vocabulary and find out what it means. Now, the next one, the next point that I want to talk about. I know I’ve already said that I don’t want to say read books, watch films. But what I’m going to say is read books and watch films, but not in the normal way. Everyone knows that if you read a book, your vocabulary will improve. If you watch a film, your vocabulary will improve. I want you to think first, about in your language, what is a good vocabulary. What makes one person sound eloquent and another person sound uneducated. So I want you to really pick and choose carefully which authors you read and which people you listen to. Now I don’t mean cut out people that you find uneducated.

I mean dedicate a couple of minutes every day, every other day to listen to talks and read books written by people that speak eloquently. For example, I really admire the way Stephen Fry speaks. I know I mentioned Stephen Fry in so many videos, but I love the way he speaks, so I’ll put on, you know, a speech or a monologue from him, and I’ll really try to listen to you know, elements of his accent, but also elements of speech. His vocabulary, the vocabulary that he uses. Which words does Stephen use that make him sound really, really educated and eloquent. And then I’ll note those down, and I’ll try and implement them into my own vocabulary.

And you can do the same. It will work in any language. So I guess the way you could summarise that point is pick and choose reading and listening exercises from which you want to improve your vocabulary. Okay, number three. If you want to improve and widen and expand your vocabulary and sound more eloquent, I want you to avoid the most boring word in the English dictionary.

Do you know which word it is? The word is very. Oh, my god. Very is such a boring word. Every time I hear it, I yawn. Why say very good if you can say excellent, fantastic, amazing, incredible? Why say very bad if you can say dreadful, appalling, hideous, revolting? Stop using the word very and start incorporating more advanced adjectives into your everyday speech and writing. When you’re speaking, try and be conscious of every time that you use the word very and which adjective you used it with. Then you can go and search the adjective in a thesaurus and find synonyms.

Very dirty can be filthy or squalid. Very cross can be seething, livid. I actually have a video about that. You can check it up there. But yeah. Being conscious of when you use the word very is very, very useful. How ironic. So I just made that mistake there. Being conscious of the word very is an invaluable tool. Doesn’t that sound better? Doesn’t it sound better? I think it does. My last tip might not be for everybody, but it really helps me, especially when I’m bored and waiting for something.

I’m an incredibly impatient person. I hate waiting. And if there’s one room that an impatient person cannot stand, it’s a waiting room. So I recommend that you use this time to your advantage. When you’re doing nothing, say you’re sitting on a train, you’re sitting in a waiting room, any time you’re waiting, do vocabulary checks. So just sit or stand and observe the room around you or the area around you and try and find something that you don’t know how to say. It’s most likely going to be a noun, but it could be a verb. It could be somebody doing something. Somebody could be skipping and you think, “Oh, god. “I don’t know how to say that in Japanese.” It could be an emotion that somebody has.

Just use that time to look around. Meticulously note down what it is that you don’t know, and then search it. If you’re trying to acquire vocabulary in another language, then you can just write it down in your own language. It gets a bit more complicated if you don’t really know how to say the word in your own language. Use what you can. Take a picture of it. Video it if appropriate. Try and describe it. Use other words to describe it. Note it down and then you can talk to somebody about it.

Something that I’m going through at the moment is farm vocabulary. My boyfriend is a farmer, and I have suddenly been launched into this new world of machinery and he said to me the other day, “Oh, we use farm save or something.” And I was like farm save. So I just noted it down, got back home, searched it and I’m holding it was farm save is now. I think it’s when you keep your own seed and then you use it the next day.

Sometimes if he’s gone off in the tractor and I have to wait for him, I’ll just look around the farm and I’ll think, bale, challenger, John Deere tractor, and if there’s anything I don’t know how to say, I will then ask him later. And it might be a bit annoying for him, but I’m trying my best. Right guys. That’s it for today’s lesson. I hope you learned something. I hope you enjoyed it.