Building a Universe of Vocabulary

“The limits of my language are the limits of my universe” is what a famous quote by Johann Wolfgang Goethe says. If you agree with him you’d better enlarge your vocabulary if you want to impress people with the tremendous size of your universe. Honestly, I have been following this philosophy for a while now and already in PC 1 my progress regarding vocabulary learning became somewhat evident. In order not to lose the momentum and with the final PC looming on the horizon

in January I advised myself to keep on working on academic vocabulary. So this is exactly what I am doing right now. In the process I am discovering the benefits of both, the AVL lists as well as the exercises in the Porter textbook. Meanwhile I have also become more familiar with the corpora I considered most useful for me. I have mainly learned to do with COCA, but also the British Corpus. As in one of my fellow students’ blogs I read that there will be 800 new words we are expected to know along with all their synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation and collocations I am convinced I will be using them frequently throughout the next weeks. Other strategies which will help me master the overwhelming number of new words will include the following:

+) Consultation of websites such as Onelook.com or The free Dictionary tdf.com Both sites are particularly useful for acquiring new phrases and idioms.

+)Skim reading fellow students’ blogs in order to find out about their strategies

+) Use of the good old flashcards to cope with words I really struggle to memorize

Of course even following the best of all plans will guarantee ultimate success in the exam but it will give me a better chance of a solid score for PC2. Heaving PC worries aside for a moment I also want to emphasize the importance of a wide range of vocabulary for the academic paper we have to write in the other part of SUK3. I may be just about finishing it, but I can already ascertain that I could not have done it as easily had we not done so many exercises related to academic language before. Reading through articles and academic texts when researching for the paper was easier as well as I did not come across too many new words in the process. The words I did not know

I immediately included into my vocabulary notebook to be prepared for future occasions. By and large things work out really well in terms of getting ready for the vocabulary showdown in January. For now I will stay cautiously optimistic and want to wish a merry X-mas to all the readers and followers out there in the universe filled with vocabularies (and X-mas cookies these days ;-))