The English language contains more than 1 million words. That may seem excessive, especially when you consider that studies have shown that an average native speaker of English knows only around 20,000 words. Even many university-educated speakers know 40,000 — or a mere 4 per cent of all the existing words in English.
Yet all those million words exist for a reason in the language. They denote and specify things from common objects to abstract concepts; they offer a myriad of subtle meanings in the form of synonyms; they allow us to speak more or less formally at will; and they come with different connotations beyond their denotations, which can let you express yourself clearly with only a few choice words.
So far so good. But here’s the thing: simply glancing at a comprehensive English dictionary with its seemingly countless words may cause anyone to despair and baulk at the daunting task of trying to learn them. Understandably so. Yet the point is not to learn them all but to learn plenty enough.
Fortunately, tried-and-tested vocabulary-building methods can come to the aid of learners. “[T]he fastest way to gain a large vocabulary through schooling is to follow a systematic curriculum that presents new words in familiar contexts, thereby enabling the student to make correct meaning-guesses unconsciously,” Hirsch suggests.
“Spending large amounts of school time on individual word study is an inefficient and insufficient route to a bigger vocabulary,” he stresses. “There are just too many words to be learned by 12 th grade — between 25,000 and 60,000. A large vocabulary results not from memorising word lists but from acquiring knowledge about the social and natural worlds.”
In other words, reading lots of texts (articles, books, textbooks) on lots of subjects, preferably with different writing styles, can greatly enhance learners’ vocabulary. At the same time, doing so enables students to learn about various aspects of the world, which is of even greater benefit.
By seeing new words in proper contexts, learners can often divine their meaning with relative ease and remember them better later on, experts say.
“The trick in speeding up word-learning is to make sure that the subject matter that the words refer to has already been made familiar to the student,” Hirsch writes. “The speed with which students learn new words increases dramatically when schools create familiar subject-matter contexts within a coherent sequential curriculum, as the cognitive scientist Thomas Landauer has demonstrated. The fastest way to learn words is to learn about things — and to do it systematically.”
