How To Expand Your Vocabulary in a Foreign Language

Expanding our vocabulary is the most time-consuming task of all in language-learning. There are tens of thousands of words to learn to become a truly fluent speaker.

The most basic study method is to go through lists of words but we all know how boring this gets. On top of this, the effectiveness of learning lists goes down as we improve. We encounter words with similar meanings without understanding the nuance they add in certain contexts.

Expanding your vocabulary in the journey of learning a language is unavoidable. But there are ways to make this task less boring. I’d even go as far as saying some can be fun!

Here’s one of my favorite methods. But let me warn you. While it will be fun, it will also push your brain to its limits and feel much more tiring than all the passive study you do.

1. Choose a topic of interest

There’s no point in learning vocabulary about engineering if you never plan on using it. Forcing yourself to learn vocabulary in topics you’re not interested in, will only be a waste of energy and time. Precious time you could spend on worthwhile tasks, such as learning vocabulary you’ll use.

Choose a topic related to your hobbies, your work, your environment. You’ll get much more mileage from working on what matters to you.

2. Write in your native language

After deciding on a topic, write one or two paragraphs about it in your native language. Don’t think about the target language and produce a piece as if you were explaining it to someone who doesn’t know it.

If you love poems, then write about how they are constructed and the varieties that exist. If you spend all your time looking up stocks and investments, then explain that. If you love traveling, write about the merits and demerits of the last place you visited.

Don’t restrict yourself by only using vocabulary you already know in your target language. Let the words flow and write as if you were teaching the topic to someone who didn’t know anything about it.

3. Search words

After you’re done writing your text, read it again, and highlight words you haven’t learned yet. Don’t rush through this part. Take your time to think hard and dig deep into your memory. Make a list of the words and their translations in the language.

There will be some words you “feel” you know. For those, try to explain them in the target language before looking them up. This will make them easier to remember later, due to the extra effort put into the task.

For the ones you don’t know at all, write their translation along with an explanation in the target language.

4. Do something else

If you’re beginning your study session, then drop this task and study something else. Why not some grammar or the next lesson on your agenda? If you’re at the end of the session, call it a day and close your notebook.

Make sure not to continue working on this for the rest of the day. It’ll allow you to make use of the percolation effect. Your brain will be tuned to notice and remember anything related to the topic for later use.

Photo by Dimitri Houtteman on Unsplash

5. Explain in the target language

The next day, get back to it. Sit down and write, by hand, a new text in your target language. Don’t make it a translation of the one you wrote the previous day. Without looking at it, start from scratch and write a few lines to explain the topic.

The more advanced you are, the more creating a long explanation will be useful. If you’re only at a high-beginner or low-intermediate level, don’t overdo it either. It’d be a shame to make yourself burn out.

Take your time and don’t use a dictionary. Create new sentences, new explanations, go around terms you’ve already forgotten. But if you can, use the ones you remember. The goal here is to find what stuck with you since the previous day.

6. Get feedback

After you’ve written in the language, type it, and get feedback from native speakers. If you have motivated native friends, ask them to have an honest look. If not, use platforms like Journaly or Italki’s Notebooks (or Lang-8 if you already have an account).

Make sure to add a note to explain the goal is to improve your vocabulary on said topic. The more precise the feedback you get, the better.

It might take some time to get the feedback, but most languages get corrected within a day. When you have the correction, analyze it, and copy the corrected text by hand to remember it better.

7. Repeat the last two steps

After all the above steps, write a completely new text on the same topic. You can explain the same subject from a different point of view or explain what it isn’t. Make sure to use the vocabulary you’ve been encountering for the past few days.

By now you should notice that a few words or expressions are easier to bring forth. Those are the most important words for you. They are your starting point on the topic.

Make this new text longer and more precise if you can. You can use the vocabulary to explain a longer trip you went on. You can go more in detail about the type of investment you’re interested in. You can compare a few poems. Let your imagination run wild but keep making efforts to use the vocabulary.

After you get feedback on this new text, analyze it, and copy it again. Compare it with the first one and find common errors. If they are about vocabulary, repeat the process until you’ve memorized the majority.

8. Read a text

After a week, find a text online about the same topic. Read it once without a dictionary. Find words you learned that week and spend conscious time remembering them. Discover new related terms and look them up.

If you are already at an intermediate level, try using a monolingual dictionary to discover even more vocabulary.

Of course, the higher your level is, the more complicated texts you should choose. At first, a short blog post would be best. But as you improve, you might want to use news articles, studies, or precise blog posts for specialists. Keep things interesting and related to what you’re looking for. If you don’t plan on reading much, you can also choose to watch a presentation or documentary on the topic.

9. Write a reaction

The final step of this method is to write a reaction to the text you read — or video — you saw if that’s what you chose. Use the vocabulary you practiced, and add the more complicated terms newly discovered.

Since this new text is a reaction, you will have the opportunity to add some more color to your writing. Give your opinion. Try to justify them with facts you established in your previous written pieces.

The more advanced you are, the longer this last text should be. As you become better in the language, you’ll have longer conversations. The texts you’ll read will become longer too. Forcing yourself to write a lengthier text now will make it easier for you to handle such future situations.

Of course, get this corrected too!

10. Make a rotation

I’m willing to bet there isn’t just one topic you’re interested in. So it’d be a shame to focus on one topic only. To solve this problem you can create a sort of rotation.

Of course, there are many ways to do so. But you’ll find here the two easiest to set in place, based on the time you have available to study:

• If you have enough time during your week, have steps separated by 1 or 2 days. For instance, while you’re on step 5 for a certain topic, you could be at step 2 for a different one. By the time you reach step 9 in the first, you could be at step 6 for the second.

• If you don’t have much time or aren’t in a period focusing on expanding your vocabulary, then you could spend one week on topic 1 and the next on the second. In such a case, it could be a great idea to repeat topic 1 on the third week and topic 2 on the fourth. This will cement the new vocabulary further.

This method should stay fun for you. The moment you try to expand into topics you have no interest in will be the moment this gets boring. Be careful and stay on topics of interest. You can repeat this process as many times as you want, starting each time from a higher level.

Taking the example of traveling, you could start by explaining how to move around in a country, then develop more about cultural differences before explaining where a certain cultural aspect originated from.

Unless you are studying with a precise goal in which you need the vocabulary remembered quickly, take your time. Spread this throughout the months. It’s much more useful to vary the pleasures instead of focusing all your attention on the vocabulary. Don’t forget step 4. You need to leave some time in the process. Why not go talk a bit with a native and practice your speaking skills or watch a movie in the language?

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