Hello guys! :)
Today I
decided to do a different blog post. The end of the first term at university
has come quite close, it is high time for me to start studying for the exams. In
terms of the English Progress Check this up to now mainly consists of learning
vocabulary, because I still don’t have the access link to the culture topics I
have to know. Since this exam is the most important one of my English course I
wanted to take this blogpost as an opportunity to a) share my learning
strategies with you and b) get some inspiration from you guys. Maybe you have
some different, witty learning methods I could try out to learn vocabulary more
effectively. Please leave me a comment, if you would like to share them with me :)
For many
years learning vocabulary actually wasn’t a big thing for me, at least I can’t
remember otherwise. In the last two or three years of school, however, it
became a bit of an issue because by that time I head to learn words in three
different languages - English, Italian and Latin. I had to develop more
effective ways of learning words because the amount I had to know just got too
big.
I have to
admit that I was a bit lazy when it came to learning English vocabulary. In
school I always did well at the grammar and especially at the writing parts of the
tests, so being average when it came to vocabulary-checks didn’t really matter
for me at that time because I still got very good marks.
Concerning
Italian knowing the words was more important. We had vocabulary reviews on a
regular basis which we had to learn about one DIN A4 page of words for each of
them. Thinking about it now gives me a bad feeling but at that time I only
cared about receiving good marks instead of really learning the language. So I
soon developed a method to learn the words very fast for the tests, but little
time afterwards I had already forgotten most of them again. It is hard for me
to tell what it was like, but maybe you know what I mean: I knew the words by
heart because I just learned the page like pairs of words or simply sequences
of letters, but I didn’t really know them by their meaning.
Latin, however,
was different because I was very eager to learn that language. Besides the
words in our course book were separated into various chapters containing about
20 words each which made it easier to arrange them for learning.
Nowadays I
noticed that it gets more and more important for me that the words I have to
learn are arranged properly in a certain format as it applies too to all other
things I have to learn. It took me some time to develop a system which suits me
fine. That’s why I had some problems learning words when I started learning
Spanish but now I get along quite well.
Something
which helps me a lot is an app introduced to me by my current English teacher.
It is called Memrise and makes it quite easy to manage vocabulary. The best
thing for me is that I can use it on my smartphone and therefore can learn
whenever and wherever I want, whether I am waiting at the bus stop or have a
break between my courses at university. I am on the go a lot and therefore don’t
have the time to spend a few hours in a row on learning stuff so the app comes
in quite handy. I really recommend it to all of you! Just give it a shot and
see if it helps you :)
But enough
of me, it’s time that you tell me about your learning strategies! I think this
could be useful for everybody to get new ideas on how to improve their learning
methods.
