Helpful Tips to Improve Vocabulary in English

how to improve your vocabulary

A sound Vocabulary is essential for acquiring communication skills. Using the right word at the right place makes communication more meaningful and effective. A strong vocabulary is very important for students appearing for competitive exams and also in their professional lives. We must realize that our vocabulary can not be enriched overnight. Building it requires regular and determined efforts.

Vocabulary improvement primarily involves two activities.

1) Adding new words to our vocabulary

2) Revising meanings of words we already know.

You must make the effort to learn new words regularly, if not daily. Reading is an excellent way of enhancing your vocabulary. A student aspiring to apply for higher education courses or who wants to apply for an competitive examinations should start building up skills of word power at an early stage. Revising the meaning of words already learnt is as important as learning new words. If a word is not used for a long time it easily slips from our memory. Proficiency in vocabulary can be enhanced by widening the base of our word bank. Exercises in verbal analogy and verbal ability not only improve our word power but also help us to learn how to understand the meanings of words in various contexts.

Tips to Improve Vocabulary

There are two methods that can directly enhanced your vocabulary and word bank.

1) Verbal analogy

2) Verbal ability

What is verbal analogy

Verbal analogy and verbal ability are parts of almost all major competitive examinations. The word ‘analogy’ is derived from the Greek ana, which means ‘relation’ and logus, which means ‘knowledge’.

The word analogy is a noun meaning a similar feature, condition, state, etc. shared by two things that are compared. It is also the process of reasoning based on similar features of two different things, items, people, animals, etc. in competitive examinations the verbal analogy section enables the examiner to evaluate the candidate’s reasoning skills as it test his/her ability to compare and establish proper relationships among the given items on the basis of certain commonalities.

Questions on analogy cover a wide range of relationships that we observe in our daily life. Some common types of relationships that candidates are frequently required to identify are those between state and capital, country and currency, male and female, parent and offspring etc.

How to crack ANALOGIES

You can try to understand the relationship between the word of the key pairs in the following ways.

ü  Narrowing down your choices

ü  Framing a sentence

ü  Keeping the different meaning of the words in mind

ü  Looking out for clues meant to mislead

ü  Looking for relationships

ü  Looking for synonyms of antonyms

ü  Looking for some common characteristics

Examples:

Ornithology: Birds::Botany: Plants

Explanations: Ornithology is the study of birds whereas botany is a study of plants

Prism: Glass::Wall: brick

Explanation: Prism is made of glass and a wall is made of bricks

Verbal Ability

Like verbal analogy, verbal ability is an important component of any competitive examination. There are more than forty different ways of framing questions to test the verbal ability of students. To understand this topic better, it can be divided in to four broad categories

1. Vocabulary based questions
2. Grammar based questions
3. Verbal reasoning questions
4. Writing style questions

In this article, we will talk about vocabulary based questions. There are the most common type of verbal ability questions and are probably simplest to understand and answer. In this type, the questions are based on the meaning of the given terms or its synonyms, its antonyms or idiomatic usages. This primarily aims at testing the candidate’s vocabulary.

That’s it guys, read about how to crack analogies above to improve your vocabulary and starts daily practice now.