Hi, students.
Hope you're well.
Welcome to today's lesson.
I'm going to teach you my method for expanding your vocabulary.
This is a method that I use for myself
that I developed myself for expanding my own vocabulary.
Because there are so many words out there and I
don't know enough.
I want to know as many as possible
and I want to use those words as well.
Everything in this lesson is based
on my own life-long journey of growing my vocabulary.
And this is how we can remember the method
as the "mmm" method because there
are three parts of this method.
Each one is represented by word that begins with M.
So this is also a mnemonic.
It helps us to remember the method.
Let's start over here with the first M, which is the mindset.
This is like your attitude.
You've got to have the right attitude when it comes
to expanding your vocabulary.
So let's reveal some words here.
When it comes to expanding your vocabulary,
you start off with having a curious attitude
to learning new words.
So when you find a new word, you don't know what it means,
you have to find out.
You can do this by checking the word in the dictionary
or you can do my preferred method which
is if you're in a conversation is
to simply ask the person, what does that word mean?
Now I know a lot of people are probably
too proud to ask someone what a word means because they'll
think, oh, they'll think I'm stupid because I don't know it.
And obviously it's not appropriate
for every single situation that you're in, like a meeting,
to say, excuse me, what does it mean?
But in your day-to-day life, it's
a really good way to involve word learning
in your everyday activities with the people you know and speak
to the most.
Let's contrast this to when I was a teenager, when I used
to read classic novels then.
If I came across a word I didn't know, I never checked it.
And I would just try and guess the meaning.
But sometimes, you won't get the meaning right.
So I'm even discovering nowadays there
are some words out there which from learning as a teenager
and just guessing the meaning, making it up myself,
I learned the wrong meaning.
So I strongly recommend that you check the words
that you've just learned and don't just
absorb it from the context.
When it comes to words, you also need
to be courageous because when we haven't used a word before,
we might not feel confident to actually start using it.
So when you get your new word, be courageous.
Use it.
Plan to use it if you need to.
And you can also be like a collector,
like how a collector collect objects.
Could be coins, it could be stamps.
You are a collector of words.
You've got to go out there and get your precious words.
You can even remember where you first learnt that word.
There's quite a few that stick in my mind
about where and when I learned the word
or from whom I learned the words.
So all of these mindset aspects are
going to create the right environment for you
to learn words easily because it will just be part of your life.
Let's go on to the second M. The second M is about memory.
So we have our egghead person here.
Look at his massive brain.
It makes it easy for him to learn words
because they just get sucked into the enormous brain.
When it comes to learning words, my best tip for you
is not to cram them into your mind
by staring at the word on the page.
It doesn't work.
That's what I thought learning was when I was a teenager.
So I used to spend a long time revising by staring at paper.
What actually works is to frequently remind yourself
of the same information.
It's not about staring and trying to get it in.
We have to just accept that there are certain limitations
to memory for adults.
And because of this, we have to be realistic.
There might be hundreds of words we want to learn,
new words, all in a month.
And if they are completely unrelated to words
that we already know, it's going to be
hard to learn those words, for most people.
And you have to be patient because you're
going to keep reminding yourself of words
and then forgetting them.
Keep reminding them and then forgetting.
Now I want to do the last M, which is magnificent.
When something is magnificent, you think that it's great
or it's special in some way.
So I like to think of words as being magnificent.
And therefore I like to treat them
in a way that makes the activity of learning words magnificent.
So you can do different things for this,
but something that is nice to do is
to treat it with respect by buying a very nice pen
or notebook that you can write your words in.
So just make it special in other words.
And on a more practical level, I'm
also going to make a few suggestions now about ways
that you can start learning more words.
This is an app that I'm using myself.
There are all sorts of games that you
can play while you're learning the words.
This is not sponsored.
We're on our phones so much that if we
can divert bad habits on the phone
that we shouldn't be doing to something useful, like playing
word games, it's one part of the many activities we should be
doing to expand our vocabulary.
You can make yourself a word wall.
In my case, it's the word door.
On the back of the door, I've put some paper there.
And then you write on your word wall
your newly discovered words, the ones
that you want to start using.
Etymology, big word, is to do with the origin of words.
When we know something about the etymology of words,
it helps us to mentally map the word so
that it's more likely to stick to other words that we know.
And another thing that knowing the etymology of a word
is useful for is that we get the purest sense
of the word, its most accurate meaning,
by knowing where it came from.
What was the development in that word?
So I often find, if I'm really struggling
to know what a word means or how to describe it to someone else,
I go and look at the etymology, and it becomes much clearer.
Now let's bring everything together.
Let me remind you of the "mmm" approach
because words are tasty.
You need to have the right mindset.
You have to accept the limitations of memory
unless you're this egghead guy.
And you also have to treat words as if they are magnificent
and make your learning of words a magnificent ritual, something
that you do because you enjoy it.
Apply all of those things and you
will expand your vocabulary.
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Bye.