Hi! Have you ever been in a situation where you couldn’t remember the word you wanted?
Don’t worry! It happens to everyone, even native speakers! And in a speaking exam, when
you’re maybe nervous and stressed, it can be even worse! So here are four things you
can do to communicate when you don’t know or can’t remember a word in English.
The first technique is to find a more general word or explain the word. For example, if
you can’t remember the word ‘surgeon’, you could say ‘doctor’ or if you can’t
remember the word ‘kitten’, you could say ‘baby cat’.
Describing the purpose
of an item in a sentence can also be useful. If you don’t know the word ‘scissors’,
you could say ‘They are used to cut paper’ or ‘They’re used for cutting paper’.
This works best for nouns.
For nouns and adjectives, you can use synonyms. Synonyms are simply
two words that mean the same or have a very similar meaning. For example, ‘clever’
is a synonym for ‘intelligent’, and ‘stone’ is a synonym for ‘rock’. Antonyms are
opposite words. You can often describe an adjective using the opposite adjective. If
you can’t remember the word ‘old’ you could say ‘not young’, for example.
One more technique to use when you can’t remember a word is approximations. You can say ‘it’s
like a house’ or ‘it’s a kind of house with only one floor’ when you’re trying
to describe a bungalow. Remember you can always use more than one of these language techniques
at once. So if you can’t remember the word for ‘office block’, you could say ‘it’s
a kind of tall building where people go to work at desks’.
For more tips on learning
English and preparing for your exam, subscribe to our channel and visit the LearnEnglish
Teens website where you will find loads more learning material to help you improve your
English!