How Can I Learn New Vocabulary Daily? (Explained!)

Language learners often find themselves questioning how they can improve their vocabulary.

It’s very impractical, almost impossible, to study the entire dictionary. However, there are some tips you can implement to boost your learning.

Setting reading time every day, keeping a thesaurus, learning a new word every day and using it in everyday language, playing word games online, and engaging in vocabulary-rich conversations are just some ways to boost your vocabulary daily.

Learning every day allows the brain to make new connections, create neural pathways, and help acquire more memory to boost your vocabulary growth.

Also, more vocabulary helps you communicate better, get your ideas across using fewer words, and ultimately become proficient.

This post will cover some of the techniques you can use to acquire new vocabulary every day.

Is it good to learn a new word daily?

Learning something new daily boosts brain power and improves cognitive abilities, but what about vocabulary expansion?

Most of us lose our connection with words the minute we’re out of school and don’t actively seek new words to improve our vocabulary as adults.

However, learning new words can be an enjoyable hobby that benefits you tremendously.

Word acquisition is an inductive learning process, one that boosts memory.

Remembering words is just as important as learning new ones so they can be recalled to communicate. This indicates how beneficial it can be to learn a new word daily.

Learning new words impacts different areas of the brain differently. It also helps improve your brain’s plasticity by creating important neural pathways.

Plasticity is the brain’s ability to change, recover, and adapt to gaining new knowledge. Learning new words helps with plasticity, improves cognitive skills and memory, and wards off diseases like Alzheimer’s or dementia.

The correlation between vocabulary, real-world knowledge, and intelligence helps to build stronger connections in your brain.

You may also like: How Can I Improve My Vocabulary?

How many words can I learn daily?

Native English speakers know about 15,000 to 20,000 word families. Building an active vocabulary is easy if you work on it every day.

English has over a million words, making it a significantly vast language. So, what’s a good amount of words you should target to learn daily?

To boost your learning progress, you can start by focusing on valuable words that can be used practically in daily conversations. A good range to start with is between 10-20 words daily, and use them actively when you share ideas.

Staying anywhere between this range is easy as long as you stay consistent.

However, it’s also important to remember that learning new words should not be the only focus. It’s about how you use the words within the appropriate context.

You can practice the language with your friend and write as much as possible.

With that said, there are three primary approaches to learning new words daily:

Conservative: This language learning approach promotes learning 5 to 6 words daily.
Aggressive: This approach is what most language classes use. Most instructors teaching these classes encourage students to learn at least 25 to 40 words daily.
Firehose: The third approach is very rigorous. The program is designed to encourage learning 100+ words daily to promote memory techniques such as memory palaces and mnemonics.

You can learn a few hundred words, but only one-tenth of them will remain in your memory after a week. Why does this happen? That is because the human brain has two kinds of memory: short-term and long-term.

Short-term memory allows you to remember something for only a few minutes. When that information is no longer needed, your brain stops remembering it. That means your learning depends on how much you use a word in everyday conversations. Otherwise, the time you spend on learning them will be wasted.

You can check out our Personal Productivity course, which helps boost your productivity so you can learn new words every day and effectively use them daily.

Can I learn 100 new words a day?

It is possible to learn 100 words in a day. Even though you cannot learn everything about these 100 words, you can get a basic understanding of these words in one day.

Expanding your vocabulary helps you exert greater control when communicating with others.

Learning 100 new words a day is easy when you use the right techniques. You can understand 90% of a language if you know 2,000 -3000 words. That means if you learn 100 words daily, you’ll be able to communicate in a language in 20 days.

This is an ideal case, but is it the most effective strategy for expanding your vocabulary?

There are a lot of factors you need to consider before trying to learn 100 words a day. It’s easy to get lost in the enthusiasm for learning, but there’s so much to consider.

Some major considerations include:

Languages you already know: The languages you already know significantly contribute to the number of words you pick in a day since some languages are more similar than others.
Passive vocabulary: Adding a word to your vocabulary is one way to know a word. Passive vocabulary is the words you can recognize when you read something or listen to a language.
Active vocabulary: This is the opposite of passive vocabulary, the words you can use when writing or speaking.

Memorizing words isn’t enough. It doesn’t give you enough information about how a word is used in a given context and to recognize words effectively.

Vocabulary is used to convey ideas, and ideas extend beyond single words. Thus, it’s important to understand the context of words too.

So, how can you make language learning sustainable?

Repetition systems like flashcards, online games, etc., are excellent. But they don’t help with understanding the contexts.

You need to understand that language is built on patterns. For instance, the word “beautiful” is a common English word compared to “binary”.

If you’re studying computer science, you’ll come across the word “binary” much more often than “beautiful”.

Thus, instead of relying entirely on games or flashcards, you should seek how to use words contextually in everyday interactions.

Can I learn 50 new words a day?

You can learn 50 new words a day. The best way to learn 50 new words is through the imagination method. You can break a word into meaningful parts you already know and then make a funny story by associating the broken words and visualizing the story.

Your mind works on connections, so forming stories to remember words help to absorb them.

For instance, the word serendipity means finding something valuable or pleasant by chance.

First, you can break it down into words like SEREN + DIP + ITY.

Then start with your funny story:

In a faraway serene land, there lived a lovely little girl names Dipity.

She had a knack for exploring her serene village. One day, she stumbled across a valuable treasure and opened it to find many valuables. Her discovery turned into a local legend, with people traveling far and wide to find treasure.

The human brain, by default, is built to make you forget the information. As a result, memorizing words repeatedly is often vital to retaining the information so it “sticks” to your mind.

What are the best ways to learn new vocabulary daily?

As a language learner, you put in a lot of effort to expand your vocabulary. You plough through dozens of words daily, make long lists, practice, and whatnot. But, when it’s time to speak the language, the words seem to flow over your head, and you can’t use them.

Remembering these words is often challenging, so what strategies can you use to learn new vocabulary words daily?

Let’s look at effective ways to learn new words daily.

Learning in chunks and scripts

Retaining words is easier when you learn them in small “chunks”, i.e. small phrases that combine several words and scripts, which are typical dialogues. For instance, instead of memorizing the phrasal verb “to back down”, memorize it as a part of the phrase to “come up with an idea”.

This way, you can ensure you know how to use the verb in at least one sentence.

No random vocabulary words

Your brain only remembers what is relevant to your brain. Making lists or flashcards with random words will make no difference to your vocabulary, but using them in daily communication, along with their context, helps.

While word lists and flashcards are great for revisiting vocabulary you have already learned, they’re not great for making the new words stick to your mind. Thus, linking the word to something meaningful to you is essential.

This way, you’ll be able to remember the new word if it is used in a context that you find interesting.

For instance, if you’re a fan of astronomy, there are more chances you’ll remember the word “celestial” in a sentence, such as “all the planets and stars are celestial bodies”, rather than just remembering a single word or a generic sentence.

Reading, reading, and reading

When you read, amazing things happen. When you read an article or a small portion of text, you go through hundreds of different words in context. Understanding contextual meaning is very important for understanding vocabulary and learning new words.

Learning through a flashcard may help you memorize a word, but it doesn’t tell you if it has a negative or positive connotation.

However, its connotation is usually apparent when that word is put in context.

If you need help reading fast daily and improving your vocabulary, our highly effective speed reading tool can help you read more.

Use your inner voice

Learning is an internal process. To learn a new word, you need help from your inner voice. That means listening to words, repeating them in your head, saying them inside your head, and finally, saying them out loud.

Record yourself when you say the word aloud and see whether it sounds like your inner voice.

Use morphemic and etymology

Defining the root of a particular word and immediately memorizing all the lexis with the same morph helps you to learn new words. There are a greater number of one-root structures than you might imagine – adjectives, verbs, and nouns may have one root, which helps to learn more words instead of one quickly.

Etymology is the science of understanding the words of origin. You can approach this learning technique if you’re interested in knowing the history of a word.

Knowing the origin helps you remember everything about the words – from the meaning to the spelling, but this method is not easy for everyone.

Using spaced repetition

Repetition helps fixate new words in your memory. Repeating words a hundred times a day won’t be as effective as repeating them a few times over several days or weeks, known as spaced repetition.

After you learn a new word, use it immediately. Then, recall it after an hour and review it using its context before going to bed. The next day, repeat the cycle, and finally, review it after a couple of days.

You can do this by creating index cards – using them in one sentence on one side and writing down the definition/meaning on the other. You can also create a fixed schedule for revising them.

Our Effective Note-Taking course can help you effectively use word indexes.

Speak words in real-time

It’s not easy to recall a word when you need it, even if you’ve memorized it plenty of times. To help with this, you can record yourself speaking the words you’ve learned.

Select words to describe yourself or talk about any topic. Record yourself while at it. Then, listen to this recording to help you memorize the words you used.

Review your recording to see how many words you used. Did you use any words that could be replaced with new words?

After that, re-record yourself using those new words and listen to them to see what improvements can be made.

Takeaway: Boost your vocabulary daily with effective strategies

Improving your vocabulary helps you express yourself clearly. Everyone has a fantastic memory, but how you train your mind matters so you can learn as much vocabulary as you can daily.

Focusing on useful words and their context, repeating words you learn, learning words from real-life situations, and creating a learning environment are just some ways to boost your vocabulary.

When you use learning strategies that are actually effective, you can learn as many as 100 words in a day. It also helps to stretch your brain’s muscles and expand them to help you retain more information.

If you want to improve your memory, take this Maximizing Memory course. It helps you remember the words and their context to improve your communication.

Take action toward building an incredible vocabulary and use it daily.

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