One of the most essential components of any language is the vocabulary. Now vocabulary may be hard to learn, harder to remember and even harder to use, but there are ways to make this easier. All these ways require active involvement in the learning process, though.
First method, and this may not be the hardest, but it is a little time consuming. That is, by reading sentences or texts that contain that word. You won’t know what that single word means in that sentence, but if you get the gist of what the sentence is trying to say, its enough to get a gist of the word’s meaning.
For example -
The tinnitus was starting to hurt my ears.
Now you may not know what tinnitus is (its a medical condition where you hear ringing sounds no one else does), but you can understand that the word has something to do with sound – that’s the only thing that can hurt your ears – so if you understand the context, that is the first step towards getting the meaning of the word. And the next time you read the word ‘tinnitus’ in another sentence - relating to diseases, maybe? Then you will get further context – Okay, this word stands for a medical condition… and so on. Two or three sentences in, you have a pretty good idea about what the word means, and you needn’t even pick up a dictionary for it.
Of course, for this you need to read a considerable amount of text. And you need to keep an eye out for any new words you might come across, and pause to think about what it could possibly mean.
Second method is one most people probably use – sitting down with a list of words, and actually memorizing them. Now the results are spotty, at best, because memorization gets the words only as far as the short term memory, and knowing the meaning of the words certainly won’t let you know the context or the usage - those are the most important. And memorization is actually hard. So what do you do?
Mnemonic-story method is a good solution. You make up mnemonics to learn the word. e.g. “because” becomes “Big Elephants Can Always Upset Small Elephants”. Good, huh? The best thing about mnemonics is that they are always easy to remember. The bad thing about mnemonics is, imagine making one up for every word you come across. If there are many words, there will be too many mnemonics. And this method requires you to put some thought and effort into it, too. But well, it works, and it is a fun method of learning vocabulary.
Story-method is just that – make a story for a word. For example, “abrogate” means to deny or to cancel. So break the word down into “a”+“bro”+“gate” and make up a story – a “bro” of yours is standing at the gate, and you are denying him entry. Again, fun method of learning words and again, you will end up accumulating too many stories.
The third method is my personal favorite, but is more suited for serious vocab learners. This requires you to know the meaning of one single word – and then you will end up knowing the meaning of all its cousins and relatives.
It works like this – learn a single word by any of the above methods – let me take up “tinnitus” again here. Once you have the meaning – here, “ringing sound in the ears” - go to the dictionary and look at the etymology(the history or origin of the word). So for tinnitus it is -
[Latin - ringing, from tinniere, tinn – to ring]
Great! You’ve understood that the “tinn” from “tinnitus” means ringing. And for every next word you come across, you will get the context just as easily, once you know this one specific thing. So “tinny” is a ringing sound that is unpleasant to the ears, and “tintinnabulation” is the ringing and tinkling of bells, and “tinniness” is having a high, ringing, unpleasant sound. All these words have the base “tinn”, and so you have the context for them this easily – words starting from “tinn” always have something to do with a ringing sound.
For every word you come across, try to get a look at the etymology. Knowing where a word came from really helps understanding all the other words that come from the same place.
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