How to record information in your vocabulary notebook

Jul 16, 2014

So you're enjoying watching different TV programmes and reading books in English, what do you do when you hear or read a word that you don't know? Put it in your vocabulary notebook of course! But remember a few things; first of all, don’t translate it! Try to write a meaning of the word in English as it encourages you to think in English, and a lot of the time things don’t have an accurate direct translation. Then, try to record the word as you find it, for example ‘the search party spent days looking for the lost children’. Then you get all kinds of information about how the language works. For example, the preposition we use with ‘look’ is ‘for’ and the verb we use with time is ‘spend’ (time – days), which is followed by verb ing (looking for). So then you know how to make the following sentences accurately – ‘he spends hours playing the guitar’, or ‘Tom looked for his glasses for a long time’. This knowledge is a lot more detailed than translating ‘spend’, which we also do with money and could be very confusing! 

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