English has around a million words. That’s ten words for every hair on your head. While only one hundred and fifty thousand of those words are in use, it’s still more than the hairs on your head. It’s too many! So how do we pick which of those words to learn? There is a handful of important things to consider that will help you know how to choose what words to learn.
1. Learn Words of Interest
It goes without saying, it’s easier to learn things you are interested in. It’s hard to acquire information from a boring teacher about a topic you don’t care about, but it’s easy to acquire information about your favorite hobby. As language learners, we can speed up our language acquisition by focusing on what we like.
This can be really helpful at the beginning stages of language learning because the faster we learn, the more rewarding it is. It makes us feel good about what we’ve done.
And, when we know more vocabulary, we have more opportunities to learn the harder parts of language like grammar, the rules of language, and style, the way you communicate. If you have the challenge of a limited vocabulary while trying to understand a complex grammar point, you won’t have a nice time.
I had to learn this as a teacher while teaching kids. If it’s not fun, it’s a lost case. If we try to learn a lot of stuff we don’t find interesting, we have to work a lot harder and try a lot longer to get things to stick. When I taught things they liked, I barely had to explain any of the new grammar. They just got it. And we’re the same! So if you are struggling to choose what words to learn, focus on the topics you like.
2. Learn Words you Need
This one is pretty obvious, too, but we often lose sight of it. The words we need are the words we need. We just have to learn them! So how do we know what words we need?
Of course, survival English topics like travel, shopping, at the bank, introducing yourself, and all those great things are necessary, but we all have specific needs based on where we live, what we do, and who we know.
If you live in Italy, and you are learning English, you’ll need to learn lots of different kinds of pasta because Italy has lots of noodles! If you live in New England, you’ll probably be learning the names of different kinds of trees and outdoor tools. If you live in a modern city, you’ll probably learn the names of different kinds of hangout places and restaurants. If you live in … you get the idea!
But there’s a great habit that you need that I don’t see many ELLs do. Every time you come across the need for a word, you write it down. Let’s say you are asking for directions and somebody says, “Turn right at the intersection,” and you’re like, “What’s an intersection?” You have to write that word down. Pause (wait) for a moment, ask them to spell it, and add it to a list of words you need to study. Next time you have a study session, you’ll probably have a handful of words that you needed that week. Those should be top of the study list!
3. Learn Low-Level Words
This isn’t a popular opinion. You probably don’t like it. But I’m going to say it. Learn the lower-level words first.
Lots of teachers think they are helping their students by pushing them to learn difficult and rare words. They think it looks good on tests and impresses people. They think it makes other people think you are great at English. They usually mean well, but it’s not as helpful as they think.
Focusing on high level words, and by that I mean difficult and complicated words, without mastering the basics is unnatural, slow, and hard. It’s unnatural because as we learn our own language, we always start out with simple things and vocabulary. It’s slow because it takes longer to learn the difficult and complicated things. It’s hard because you don’t have a lot of experience with English but you are trying to learn words that highly experienced speakers use.
I’ve had so many students in my IELTS classes try to impress me with big fancy words. Their other teachers just taught them and they were excited to try it out and show it off. But, most of the time they used the word incorrectly and I couldn’t figure out what they were trying to say. This happened every day when I was teaching adult IELTS students.
Did it help them get good scores? No. Using a fancy word incorrectly lowers your score, but using a simple word correctly increases your score. You have to master the simple things before you move on to the complex things.
It’s like you are learning to play soccer, and someone teaches you how to do a corner kick, which is where you kick the ball into the field from the corner. The problem is, you haven’t learned to be good at passing the ball in-game yet. Do you think you will master the corner kick easily? Will it impress a team that is looking for a new player? Or do you think they will want someone who is better at passing the ball while moving, which is twenty times more common in a game than a corner kick?
Which brings us to the last thing to consider when picking what words to learn…
4. Learn Words by Frequency
Frequency is how often something happens, like how often you it rains at your house. Does it rain every day? Then it rains frequently, or rain is a frequent thing at your house, or the frequency of rain at your house is high. The most frequent words in English are the most useful day-to-day.
There are many lists used to determine word frequency, like the list on this website, which analyzed the use of one billion words and made a list of the most common sixty thousand. The thing about languages is that usually the most frequent five thousand words is enough for day-to-day communication. If you aren’t sure what words to be learning next you can go through the list (keep track of where you are for next time) and study the first words you find that you don’t know. Repeat this whenever you feel like you are ready for more words.
Another way to use these types of lists is when you aren’t sure which word to learn from a group of words. Let’s say you translate something and find that there is more than one word for the same thing, such as snake and serpent. Which one should you focus on learning more? Snake is number three-thousand seven-hundred and eight on the list, but serpent isn’t even top five thousand. Snake is much more common, and you should learn it first. You can learn serpent later.
A problem, though, with using frequency lists to know what words to learn is that they aren’t organized by topic or level, so they aren’t the best way to learn all the time. It’s a good thing to use every once in a while to make sure you aren’t missing anything important after you’ve learned a lot of English already.
And one thing to note is that a lot of words you know are not frequent day-to-day, but still could be useful. Like the word giraffe. It’s not very frequently used, but if you live in South Africa, you’ll run into the word a lot; and most people find it more useful than, say, veteran, which is in the top three thousand words (probably because of the news).
So next time you aren’t sure what words to learn next or where to focus your studies, you can remember: words of interest, words you need, low-level words, and frequent words. And if you are needing a better way to remember the new words you pick, you need to know the keys to deep memory and how to use the best tool for vocabulary memorization.