2.1 How to establish a Good Habit on Vocabulary-building? Basic and Necessary

Remember in your early childhood, the first few words you should have known by heart were probably “Mama” and “Papa”- “mother” and “father” in some culture. When you were a few weeks old, lying in your crib and crying for no reason. Before your parents came to soothe you, you might roll your eyes around the soft conversation that calmed you down. You had no clue whatsoever on words or the dialogue, but just with a purified heart of trust. Then they brought up the walking process. They were watching you being able to stand alone with strength and confidence, manoeuvring your legs and muscles commanded by their order cautiously and progressively. In such conscientious endurance, you might have fallen to knees down and probably made a few painful scratch marks with blood. After you have succeeded and continued to do so over the years, you forgot that early challenge and eventually fell in love with children’s fairy tales and fantasy.

Once you opened your very first children’s book, your parents gave you some logical and brief definitions about the story you had read before bed. Before you went to sleep, you might have remembered some vocabulary that fascinated you in the story. Unless you were sleepwalking in the middle of the night, you were likely to be asked about the meaning of that vocabulary again the next morning. This made sure you were on track as the process repeated for a few more books until Kindergarten. In kindergarten, the English subject came as a teaching supplement for fun and schooling motivations. Starting from the alphabetical order of (A-Z) and the numerical system, your English vocabulary-building process began. At the higher level, before transferring to elementary school, you were likely to have a list of vocabulary learned based on scenarios such as home and family, school, and community, society, transportation, emotion, and interpersonal relationship. Alongside good storytelling and playground-style interactions, you could use English in parts of your daily life.

In the later school years, you established your own vocabulary-learning technique in your study. Some vocabulary memorised were bound to be part of the writing process or terms specialised in certain subjects. Most of you have done some artistry work on the enlistment of all vocabulary in a small notepad, flashcards, or a wall poster. So, you could see and remember that you learned about them. It was recommended by your English teacher but not from me. I am not against any methodology of understanding vocabulary as long as you feel comfortable doing so. However, there is another layer of understanding and technique in the process which can enhance the quality of vocabulary-building in different stages. What kind of information would you put on the flashcard to determine the meaning of the chosen word? How many would look up the word in detail in the dictionary and try to depict the structure of the word? Unless you were told by your older brother and sister about their pain, dictionary could be extremely useful for vocabulary building.

For elementary, middle, and high school students, categorisation of vocabulary is the best approach for your vocabulary-building. There are two forms of categorisation other than following the alphabetical order of the word (and it is silly to do so): by part of speech, and by word-group. Most English dictionaries contain the information you need. I highly recommend using Active-Learner version and Advanced version so you can save some money when you move up your academic ladder later in life. For parts of speech, you must differentiate along 1) nouns- name, place, thing, an act, a feeling, an idea, 2) pronouns replacement of a noun such as he, she, it, 3) verbs- describing the action, state of (verb to) being, 4) adjectives- modifier of noun or pronoun, 5) adverbs-modifier of verbs and adjective, 6) prepositions- linkage between the noun and spaces, 7) conjunctions- joint words, phrases, or clauses, and 8) interjections-expression such as ‘Oh!’, ‘WoW!’ and ‘Ouch!’ . Let’s look at the underlined categories of 1), 3), 4) and 5). Do you see anything special among them? Hint: these four are where most of, or almost, all vocabulary would fall into. And look closely, they are interchangeable with each other. Let’s look at 1) nouns and 3) verbs; and use the word ‘exist (v)’ as example. In 3) “I exist (v) today.”  Vs in 1) “I am in existence (n) [exist-ance] today.” The word ‘exist’ changes the course in different grammatical settings. Again, let’s look at 4) adjectives and 5) adverbs as they complement each other. As “happy” for example, “I am happy (adj) [hap-y] today” vs “I smile happily (adv) [hap-pi-ly] after the rain.” Again, it changes the course in different grammatical settings. For the time being, you know which go into which part of speech.

The development of word groups is so important in the categorisation process. Grouping vocabulary can increase the overall appropriateness and accuracy in your expression. It is not only limited to writing in general but also enhancing your communication skills when interacting with unfamiliar people. You can start at the elementary level, you can for example group all the feelings together: happy, cheerful, glad, annoyed, impatient, worried, cautious, terrified, disappointed, discouraged, hopeless, surprised, stunned, uncertain, admiring, embarrassed, lonely, isolated. And you can repeat the entire process of grouping across the themes. Now have you seen something in the above example of feeling? There are some patterns in the above example. The first is the use of passive (-ed) as adjective form. The second one has to do with the relationship of meanings: synonym and Antonym. For example, ‘being happy’ is the opposite of ‘being worried’. Depending on your English dictionary selection, you can find the synonym and antonym at the same time. If not, you should seek help from the Thesaurus- which is a dedicated reference book for searching the best-fitting synonym and antonym in general English usage. And there is the final one relates to the Morphology of vocabulary: Prefix and Suffix. But stay tuned for that later.

Before moving onto the advanced level of vocabulary-building, I do not want to let my dear reader out of the woods without help. Many English books out there gave you a scenario-based solution by placing you in an unknown situation and asking you to solve it. For example, how to fill in the blanks of a statement out of a given word choice. I guess there are high school students at this stage preparing for their college or university entrance exam including the English Proficiency test in some case. I do highly recommend reading Norman Lewis’s Word Power Made Easy as opening the door beyond categorisation of basic-tier vocabularies. It enables you to expand your thinking and the specification of vocabulary based on its natural characterisation. On top of using a good reference book, you should read more and listen more to maintain a good vocabulary-building habit.

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