Should Have Perfected My English Vocabulary

Yesterday was a public holiday here in Singapore for Good Friday. I spent a good part of the day studying French words.

As of today, I am 28 percent of the way through my dictionary. Typically, I spend about three hours a day learning French vocabulary, allocating two hours to learning new words and another hour to reviewing the words I’ve learned during the preceding two days.

Not many people try to study vocabulary by going through their dictionary from beginning to end, but I have done it for French at least twice before, so I’m quite used to the idea and also know very well what to expect.

While it’s an efficient method to acquire an extensive vocabulary in a relatively short period, you also forget many of the words you’ve learned. It sounds like a largely wasted effort, but I’m not dismayed by this phenomenon anymore as I’ve experienced it so many times before.

The important thing is that you shouldn’t feel disappointed by the number of words you forget; instead, adopt a zen attitude about it and continue learning a new set of words every day without worrying too much about retaining them in your memory.

Since I’m not too concerned about forgetting words, I don’t use flash cards in my attempt to secure them in my long-term memory either. All I ever do is peruse the dictionary entries meticulously without explicitly trying to commit them to memory. As a result, while certain words will stick in my head, other words will inevitably be forgotten, but I'm perfectly fine with it. 

When I am done learning my current dictionary, I intend to either study the same dictionary again, or switch to another dictionary and learn the contents from cover to cover. Either way, I should be prepared to spend a few years repeating this cycle of studying an entire dictionary to acquire a vocabulary extensive enough for reading French novels without feeling frustrated.

By the way, when I was learning English earnestly during my first two years of college, I also studied tens of thousands of words and expressions, including idioms, slang, and phrasal verbs. Sometimes I spent more than five hours a day studying, which certainly helped to boost my ability to understand English. By the end of the second year, I was already able to read English novels comfortably.

Little did I know back then that my English learning journey would be far from over. Although I read dozens of books, somehow it didn’t contribute too much to my spoken fluency in English. Since then, I have tried various methods, such as shadowing movie dialogues and English broadcasts, as well as memorizing novel passages verbatim, in which I’ve achieved varying degrees of success. I’m quite fond of my current learning method, which is writing a journal entry and having it proofread by ChatGPT, as I find it quite effective in identifying problem areas in my English.

If I could start all over, I would have persisted a bit more in perfecting my knowledge of English vocabulary before starting to read novels. Up until now, I still encounter a few unknown words or phrases when I watch an American movie or series on Netflix, especially slang and colloquial expressions. Although I can still follow the general flow of the story, I feel slightly uncomfortable when I come across unknown words, and get a bit jealous of native speakers for understanding the content perfectly.

Now that I’m learning French intensively, I don’t have the time to relearn English vocabulary for the foreseeable future. However, if and when I get tired of my French studies and need to take a break, I’ll be more than happy to plunge back into learning English and deepen my understanding of its colorful colloquialism.