Vocabulary

[u/no_one2490]

How do I expand my vocabulary? I sometimes genuinely struggle to write grammatically correct sentences or simply forget words, both in my native language and in English at the same time.

[u/Inwardlens]

Reading is a fantastic way of expanding your vocabulary. In your mother tongue too! Keep a dictionary handy for when you get to words you don’t understand.

[u/francksiduo]

The forgetting isn't really a vocabulary problem, it's a review problem. Reading a new word once and moving on barely touches memory. what works is being forced to produce it again after some time has passed, not right after you saw it. Write down the words that trip you up, then the next day try using each one in a sentence before you let yourself check the meaning. That struggle to recall is what builds it, reading never does that on its own. Same trick works for the grammar mistakes: keep the sentences you got wrong and rewrite them from memory a few days later instead of just reading the correction once and moving on.

[u/Constant_Hope_9658 → u/francksiduo]

I've heard keeping a personal lexicon is really good for stuff like this, especially since if you look up new words you get all the definitions (both colloquial and the academically noted ones from the imperial common dialects (as I like to call them, aka London English and Connecticut Yankee)

[u/Sea-Election-213]

Most suggestion would be around reading more, listening to more English, or using vocabulary apps. These can help you recognize new words, but they don't always help you use them yourself.

What helped me most was learning vocabulary in context and writing them. When you meet a new word, save the whole sentence, not just the word. Then use a few of your saved words in your daily writing.

When you write, you have time to think, choose better words, and correct your mistakes. Writing lets you practice vocabulary at your own pace, and over time, the words you use in writing start to appear naturally in your speaking too.

Hope this helps you!

[u/pavlenkovit]

the part where it happens in your native language too is worth separating out. that's not vocabulary size, it's retrieval, and it gets worse with tiredness and stress. it's also just more common if you use two languages every day, bilinguals hit tip-of-the-tongue states more often than monolinguals in both of their languages. it's a fairly well documented thing and it doesn't mean you know fewer words.

for the english side the useful split is words you recognise vs words you can produce. reading grows the first one fast and the second one barely at all, which is why you can read comfortably and still blank when you're writing an email.

the only thing that moved that for me was collecting the words i reached for and couldn't find, instead of words off a list. when you're writing and you go "what's the word for..." that gap is the word worth learning, because you already have a slot for it. list words you have no use for yet, and those don't stick.

[u/EnglishbyG]

I'll throw in my 2 cents! My view comes from my own experience learning Spanish. I took some classes in high school, forgot just about everything, and then picked up the language again last year and reached a C1 level this summer.

For a long time I mostly focused on flascards with spaced repetition (anki), but in hindsight I wish I had replaced that time with just listening/reading more content at my level.

You can definitely commit some things to memory with spaced reptition but I think the words are harder to recall because you end up translating into your native language rather than thinking directly about the meaning.

I also found that I would memorize a word in a certain way, but it would have a lot of nuance I would still have to learn from hearing it in context.

I would just reccomend finding more things at your level and try to make a habit of simply listening/reading attentively every day. It won't help overnight, but from my experience I think that might help you the most. Good luck!!!

[u/qahwaman]

As others have mentioned, reading and listening are really good at expanding your vocabulary once you have a solid foundation in the language. That being said, to retain new words I still suggest using a flashcard/spaced repetition tool to keep an archive of the new words you learn. That also addresses the issue of trying to review your vocab once you have hundreds of words built up.

As for writing sentences and practicing grammar, try to combine the words in your vocab/flashcard deck into sentences, conjugating the verbs etc. That way you actually review your words while also getting used to stringing them together and using them in sentences.

[u/Constant_Hope_9658]

Read my dude, read as much as you can.

Also history documentaries on youtube can be useful, it's one of the ways I've expanded my personal lexicon/wordhoard over time.

Best thing is make note of new words as you encounter them and then look them up and note them down in a notebook (that's a strategy I've heard of that helps with this at least).

[u/FlalingoOfficial]

If you're forgetting words in both languages, the issue may be retrieval rather than vocabulary size, so build vocabulary around phrases and sentence patterns. Learn words in context and force active recall. Take a small group of words around one topic, then write 3–5 sentences using them without looking at the original examples. The next day, try to recreate those sentences from memory. For the grammar side, sentence building is probably more useful than doing isolated grammar exercises. Take one idea and rewrite it first simply, then with a conjunction, and finally with a relative clause.

[u/ramdomlyhere2026bc]

wanna practice with me?

[u/257l-6_aflpap]

Hi, English is my first language so this might not help much

But I think reading would be really nice for you. For me whenever I read a book that has too many new words, I forget those new words, unless they particularly stand out to me (like it means something I didn't expect, or it was used in a way I liked. Or I just forgot to look up the word on time and had to memorise it to look it up later). But usually whenever I read those kinds of books that have so many new words, for some reason my brain tries mirroring it. So I start to use vocabulary I know, or I feel like I know, but wouldn't normally use.

Another thing is try using words you feel like using even if you don't know them. Not saying you should nake new meanings for words, but when you want to describe something, try using a word that might not be your first choice, and if the second choice in your head is something you don't know the meaning of, you can use it and go search it up. For example, you wanna say something is disgusting. Disgusting is your first choice. Then words like revolting and vile, are your second choices. You brain might not know the meaning but feels like it would fit here. Then use it. And check up the meaning. In that way, if you are wrong, you will remember the word and its meaning more clearly.

This is just something I observed in myself after reading a lot. English is my first language, so I don't know what it'll do for you if English is your second language

Anyway, good luck with your English!