Learning new vocabulary is no easy feat, especially if it's the English language which contains a mind-blowing number of words (1,022,000 to be exact) and keeps growing all the time.
However, a teacher, author, speaker, and passionate language learner Olly Richards argues that there is one surprising, effective and fun way to better memorize new vocabulary.
It's through reading stories with relatively short chapters slightly above your current level of English.
As he explains in one of his YouTube videos, when reading such stories, one doesn't have to focus on trying to remember new words or understand everything on the page. It's all about getting the plot right. When the main objective is to follow the story itself, learning comes to you almost naturally.
Here's what he recommends doing:
Read each chapter through to the end (even if it's a struggle)
Go back and read it again
Look up key words in the dictionary. The goal should be not to memorise these words, but to understand the plot of this particular chapter just enough so that you can move on with your reading
Read again until the main elements of the plot are clear
Listen to the recording of the text at the same time
This way, you can gradually and naturally increase your comprehension as you go along. Olly Richards points out that struggling to understand each chapter without looking up words as much as possible is the essence of this learning technique. And by reading the same parts of the story again and again you can revisit and review the new words without the need to create long and boring vocabulary lists!
Have you ever used this tip before? What level of English do you currently have? Take our free online assessment of your English level here.
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