How to LEARN & REMEMBER English Words: My Top Tips

Have you ever forgotten a word in the middle of a sentence? Maybe you have even paused your conversation to look up a word in the dictionary or on an electronic translator. In this lesson, I will teach you the key areas that can help you to learn and REMEMBER English words. These include focusing on a word’s meaning, spelling, pronunciation, and grammar. Learn why each of these areas are important and learn how they help you to remember. The tips in this video are based on current brain and language learning research, so you can trust that they are effective. To see how well you understood this lesson, take the quiz at https://www.engvid.com/how-to-learn-remember-english-words/

TRANSCRIPT

Hello. My name is Emma, and in today's video we are going to talk about learning new words, and some tips and tricks that can really help you with this. Okay? So, English has one of the world's largest vocabularies, and every year there are more and more words that come into the English language. So, every year I learn new words, and every year I hope you learn new words, too. So, in this video I'm going to talk about how we can really learn all these new words well, and how we can get a really deep understanding of these words and really know what they mean. Okay?

So, to get started, I've drawn a beautiful picture of a guy who kind of looks like Charlie Brown, and I have here HIS SKULL IS OPENED, and you can see at the top... I don't know if you realize what that is, but that's his brain. And the reason I've drawn this is because when we're learning new words, what we're really doing is we're taking new words and we're putting them into our brains, and we're storing them in different ways. Okay? So, what we want to do is we want to find the best way that makes our brain really happy when we're learning these words, because that will help us remember them better, and learn them better.

So, I'm going to talk about maybe a word that I learned recently, and I want you to think about maybe the last word you learned. Okay? Because that'll help you in this video to think about a word that you have learned recently. The word I learned recently was "binge-watch", and I'll be talking about this word to give examples when we talk about how to help your brain learn new English words.

So, there are four areas we're going to be talking about today. We're going to be talking about meaning and that's, like, you know, understanding a word. Understanding it, and knowing how to use it and when to use it. We're going to talk about spelling. A lot of people don't know this, but spelling is very important when you're learning new words, and I'll tell you why. We're going to talk about pronunciation, which is another key and another very important area of learning new words. And then the grammar of the words-okay?-which is also very important.

Each of these areas-meaning, spelling, pronunciation, and grammar-each of these are ways your brain stores a new word. Okay? So that's why each of them is very important. Your brain, when you learn a new word, it stores it based on the meaning, on the spelling, on the pronunciation, and on the grammar, so that's why we're going to look at each of these areas today and think about them when we're learning a new word. So, let's get started with meaning.

Okay, so the first thing we're going to talk about is a word's meaning. Okay? What does it mean? So this is, of course, very important when you're learning a new word because, you know, without knowing the meaning, how can you use the new word, right? So, I have here some questions that I like to ask myself when I'm learning new words, because it helps me to think about what's important about the word, and also it helps me to make more connections with the word, and that will help me remember the word more. Okay?

So, first of all, I like to ask myself when I see a word maybe that I kind of know: "How well do I know this word? Do I know it really well? Do I use it all the time already? Have I never seen this word before? Maybe I've seen this word before, but I don't know what it means. Or maybe I kind of know what it means, but I'm not really comfortable with it." Okay? So I usually ask myself, if I see a word: "Have I seen it before? Can I guess what it means?" Okay?

Do I understand the word? And this is different than: Can I use the word? Because when we're talking about understanding, we're talking about, you know, reading. When you look in a book and you see the word written, can you understand what it says? And we're also talking about listening. When you hear someone say it, do you know what they're saying? Do you understand the word when they're...? They're using it in a sentence? So, we have understand, which is about reading and listening, and then we have using it: Can I use the word? And this is: Can I use the word in conversation or when I talk? Can I use the word in writing? […]