ACQUIRE AN ENVIABLE VOCABULARY

Do you remember hearing a speaker utter a fancy-sounding new word that caught your attention?  You must have googled it and decided to use it yourself in the future. Not only are words useful, but they can also be beautiful, interesting, attention-grabbing and efficient.

Let's take an example: James Cameron is a highly respected and skilled veteran director known for using novel special effects in Hollywood. Is there a way to make this sentence sound crisp and yet convey each of the descriptions used for James Cameron? How about using the word DOYEN - meaning a highly respected and skilled person in a particular field? James Cameron is a doyen of Hollywood directors known for innovation in special effects. With just one word DOYEN - we can convey that he was a front runner, a highly skilled and a respected veteran in his field. 

Here is another example: I love the earthy smell that emanates out of the ground when it first rains. I love the smell of PETRICHOR. Petrichor replaces 4 ideas. Just one word does it. Having a rich vocabulary increases the precision of our descriptions. Acquiring a rich vocabulary makes us smarter because it helps us process different ideas quicker (in the above case 3 or 4 ideas put together). It also adds sophistication and charm to our speeches.

As a public speaker, it makes a lot of sense to add new words at presentations. It adds life and intelligence to our messages. My mother tongue is Kannada but I am a public speaker in English primarily. Although I have learnt English from very young in school, it takes more than school to acquire an excellent vocabulary. ^Research says by age one, children recognize about 50 words; by age three, they recognize about 1,000 words; and by age five, they recognize at least 10,000 words. However, acquisition of vocabulary slows down after completing college if one isn’t proactive. Think about it, if we are not deliberate enough, we might even go on to learn only 5-20 new words a year as an adult! We can survive with limited vocabulary but if we want to thrive it is a good idea to keep on with the quest of learning low-frequency words in a language.

I remember taking up GRE exam (Graduate Record Examination) in 2008 where my percentile was  57 percentile in the Verbal Section while my Quantitative Aptitude scores were 77 percentile. I suddenly was made to realize where I was placed globally in terms of vocabulary and comprehension amongst the pool of thousands of students who took the exam. A disgruntled me decided to push those measurements higher up. The Little Red Book - Word Power Made Easy by Norman Lewis (seen in pic) became the book to swallow up, digest and ingest. It had a word list of more than 2000. It is a fantastic workbook to exponentially increase one's vocabulary. Apart from the word list itself, it dwelt into etymology and had exercises. This method of vocabulary acquisition is called Deliberative Vocabulary Building. 

I thought working with that book for a whole year would give me wings to fly. But vocabulary does not come by memorizing and learning words like we learn multiplication tables, alone. It comes through interaction. It comes through contextual inference when we hear or see a new word. It comes through actively using them correctly. It becomes part of us when we hear it used in many situations and it becomes part of us when someone corrects our usage. This method of acquiring vocabulary is called Incidental Vocabulary Building.

So, what I thought would take 1 year actually took me more than 3 to fully absorb all the words in it. I initially had flash cards of words with their meaning and usage and would revise my word lists every week. It did help some. The more I revised the more it went to my subconscious. The more ways I figured using it, the more it expanded. The more I spotted these words, the more permanent a mark it became. And trust me on this, when someone corrected me, it made the deepest permanence.

I have been learning 1 new word every day from 3 years as a resolution which leaves me familiar if not thorough in 365*3=1095 new words. And that's a good habit to invest in. 

So, my tips for acquiring an envious vocabulary is to: -
1. Learn a word a day deliberately. If you fall back on your resolution, return back instead of quit
2. Revise all the words periodically
3. Read a lot of books of different genres as you can
4. Mark the words that come your way - that intrigue you - learn about them and add them to your word list
5. Figure out ways to use the new words in several ways and not just one way
6. Engage in conversations and listen to good speakers
7. Rejoice instead of sulk every time any vocabulary mistake you make is corrected

8.  And please pay extra attention to pronunciation and right usage because unlearning is much more difficult than learning

^Shipley KG, McAfee JG. Assessment in speech-language pathology: A resource manual. 5th. Boston: Cengage Learning; 2015