Vocab - Final Spurt

Hey there, guys :)

Well, seems like it’s the time of the year again when most students live on coffee and spend their nights poring over books and laptops (sounds familiar, huh?). At least, that’s what I’ve been doing for the last two weeks. One of the bigger tasks I set myself for the Christmas break (even though I still wonder what this break thing was actually about ;) was starting to study the Porter vocab.

I’ve read lots of useful blog posts of my fellow students, tried some new websites, used the sources and adapted the methods I liked the most. So here is how I’m trying to improve my learning strategy (I’m probably going to repeat some aspects I’ve already mentioned in my first vocab post in order to keep it understandable):

Stoplight System

First of all, I always create my own vocab lists because they make it so much easier for me to study. I usually set up three columns: one with the word in question, one for an explanation in English and one for anything else that I think is worth mentioning (or necessary).

When I study, I’m always equipped (it actually feels more like armed) with several highlighters to mark things in different colors following the stoplight system:

red = extremely tricky word that needs lots of repetition

yellow = a word with kind of surprising aspects I didn’t know before but believe I’m capable of learning quickly

green = when I feel like I’ve really mastered one of the trickier words, I’ll mark it in green so I won’t repeat it ten more times when there are other words that need more practice (you know…time is money ;)

Ways of compensating for the downsides of vocabulary.com

I think we all agree that vocabulary.com is a helpful website, but (as I found out while studying for PC1), there are some downsides. Luckily, there are plenty of other websites to use in case vocabulary.com lets you down.

Pronunciation

When studying vocab on vocabulary.com, I force myself to say each word out loud once. Whenever I hesitate, guess or just plainly don’t know how to pronounce a word, I’ll listen to the pronunciation provided and add the phonetics to the right-hand column of my vocab list.

However, you should be aware that vocabulary.com won’t give you differences between British and American English. Plus, when a word can be, for example, a noun and a verb and has two ways of pronouncing it, both ways are provided but without telling you which one belongs to which word form. That’s why I use howjsay.com a lot (the guy who’s pronouncing the words will tell you the differences between British and American English as well as differences between noun, verb, adjective or whatever).

SkELL (Sketch Engine for Language Learning) vs. Just The Word

I have to admit that corpora didn’t really convince me right away. Only when I started using just-the-word.com did I realize how useful corpora actually are. What I like about Just The Word is that the website provides several categories of words connected to the word you’re looking for. It also shows how frequently a collocation is used. I mostly use it when I’m writing a text and I‘m not sure what word to use together with another word (it’s great when it comes to prepositions!).

What’s different about SkELL is that when you enter a word into the search bar, the website leads you directly to several example sentences, so you get the results at a glance and don’t have an extra step in between (which can get pretty annoying when you have 600 words to learn ahead of you). What I also like is that SkELL shows you how many hits per million a word has and therefore gives you an idea of how often that word occurs in English texts.

To sum it up, I prefer SkELL whenever I want to get a general idea of how the word is used. However, I use Just The Word more often when I’m looking for something very specific like the right preposition.

Dictionaries

Vocabulary.com is definitely not flawless, and sometimes there are so many explanations I get even more confused than I sometimes already am. That’s why other dictionaries can be really helpful.

Here are two of my favorites:

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English is easy to find your way around (just type the word into the search bar – there you go) and it provides everything a student’s heart desires: pronunciation, a short explanation, example sentences, frequent expressions, and sometimes even a picture.

Another one I like quite much is The Collins Dictionary. You need to choose between American and British English, but apart from that first step it’s all quite clearly structured. It’s a lot simpler than Longman, but sometimes you might not even want 50 example sentences, but just a comprehensible explanation of what the word means, how it’s pronounced, and a handful of collocations and synonyms to go along with it. There’s also some fancy stuff like the word origin and translations into several other languages, in case you are super ambitious or just really interested.

Last But Never Least

My last recommendation and most important strategy: START EARLY. It never helps to overtax your brain with 700 words in two days’ time because the vocab will never stick. Or if it does for the exam, at least it won’t forever. And isn’t that what we are actually all aiming for (okay, apart from passing the test of course ;)? So if you’ve not started yet – what are you waiting for?!

I’ll keep my fingers crossed for all of you in PC2!

See you, bye-bye :)