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Americans studying language and learning new vocabulary

By Tom Aaron

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Published: 20May2009
Word count: 797
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Accumulating new vocabulary is one of the challenges you will have in learning a second language. You have already absorbed a significant amount of vocabulary in your first language and you did so without making a major effort. For your second language, we would like to suggest three tools for learning and remembering new vocabulary.

The first tool that you might find helpful is simply writing down new vocabulary and creating cohort groups. Although the examples presented here are for English, the vocabulary techniques apply to all languages. Suppose we start with the word bark, which has two meanings. One bark would fit into the animal sounds cohort group. The other bark is the outside of a tree trunk. You could write the second bark in the tree cohort group.

Let's try another word: violet. You put violet into the color cohort group. Violet has another meaning, a flower. You put violet into a second group, the flower cohort group.

Imagine you have six dozen cohort groups. You have groups for trees, colors, foods, animal sounds, emotions, clothing. The list is endless. All this grouping takes time. Learning a language takes time.

You can set up your cohort groups in a number of ways. You can make cohort lists on your computer. You can make cohort lists on pieces of paper. One approach is writing each word on a piece of paper and then sorting the pieces of paper into their cohort groups. As you sort the pieces of paper into their cohort groups, remember to say the word out loud, and if you can, you should use the word in a sentence.

Learning new words is time consuming. You need to be industrious. Here's where cohort groups get more complicated. Suppose you write industrious on a piece of paper, and create a new cohort group: the busy group. If you create the busy cohort group, you need to create the not busy cohort group. Words such as industrious, diligent, productive, energetic and studious fit into the busy cohort group.

Next you'll want to put words on pieces of paper to sort into the not busy cohort group. For the not busy group, you'll want slacker, lazy, loafer, sluggish and laidback.

In addition to creating cohort groups, another tool you could try for remembering new vocabulary words is diagramming. One diagramming approach is sorting words into places on a spectrum. Suppose you take all the busy and the not busy words that you have on small pieces of paper. You have energetic, diligent, sluggish, productive, studious, industrious, slacker, lazy, loafer and laidback. If you were to sort these words from the least busy to the busiest, you would have to spend some time thinking about the meaning of each word, moving each word around on the spectrum, saying each word out loud, and using each word in a sentence. I suspect after writing these words down and sorting, you would have a good start to mastering these words sufficiently so that you could understand them when you hear them and use them.

A third tool for remembering new vocabulary is visual images. Suppose you want to remember the word violet. You might draw a mental image of an iris. You would see the iris in your mind's eye and think violet. With visual imaging, you might want to think of two words together, such as violet and violin. You might see yourself playing a violet violin. A visual image of a violet violin might help you to retain both violet and violin.

Visual images, diagramming and cohort groups help you to remember new words because you are linking new vocabulary to something else. Remembering is an easier task when something not yet known is linked with something known. The something known could be already learned words or a visual image. Linking new vocabulary words to already known items in picture form will help you to remember new vocabulary.

You probably already know how you learn best. Some of us learn best when we create visual images while some of us learn best when we do something with our hands. You may find that a combination of visual images and diagramming with a pencil helps you to remember better than another approach. You may find that using a pencil and paper helps you to remember better than using a keyboard and computer.

Learning a language requires diligence and steady effort. Many of us start to learn languages and get only as far as knowing enough to order food in a restaurant and ask where the hotel is. No matter what your goal, these tools - sorting into cohort groups, arranging spectrums and visualizing images - will help you to steadily progress in your language learning.

Aaron Language Services on the web at http://www.aaronlanguage.com provides translation, proofreading, and online English coaching to a primarily Japanese client base.

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