With at least 600,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary, you may be wondering how to choose which words to learn. Which words are going to give you the most “bang for your buck”? What’s the most effective way to add words to your ever-growing vocabulary?

Although nowadays some teachers view structured vocabulary lists as old-fashioned and boring, they’re actually very helpful. In fact, research shows that presenting unrelated words in short lists, without any context, can actually improve learning.

Two lists that I recommend are the Fry Word List of 1000 high-frequency words (for beginners) and the Academic Word List (for intermediate and advanced learners). These are widely recognized by ESL professionals as two of the most scientifically compiled and comprehensive word lists for English learners. These lists are so valuable that I’ve devoted a separate post to discussing their features and benefits. If you are a more advanced learner, and especially if you’re in an academic setting, you might also want to check out the newer Academic Vocabulary List.

Because they are so commonly used in English, another helpful group of words to learn is phrasal verbs. Phrasal verbs consist of a common verb and one, two, or even three short words that look like prepositions or adverbs but are actually called particles. The English Club has helpful lists of these phrases and there are plenty of online resources for studying them.

But should you study unrelated words from a list or words that are organized into what we call “semantic groups” … such as days of the week, colors, vehicles, and vegetables? Research on this subject has been very interesting. It’s true that grouping related known words can help us retain them in our short-term memory. However, researchers have found that foreign language learners actually have more trouble learning words that are presented in semantic groups. And yet this is the way vocabulary words are usually presented in textbooks!

NOT studying organized “semantic groups” of related words may seem counter-intuitive (which means not what we would expect to be true). But I believe it makes sense. To this day, I frequently confuse the French words mardi (Tuesday) and jeudi (Thursday) and gauche (left) and droit (right) … probably because I learned them together. And, as I pointed out before, learning words from a scientifically compiled vocabulary list like the Fry Word List or the Academic Word List ensures that you focus on the most common words in English texts.

My suggestion, if you want to group “like words” together, would be to develop your own categories of vocabulary words and add new words to the ones you already know. Your categories would be based on what you yourself need to achieve your goals. For example, if you are preparing for a test of English like TOEFL, I would compile a collection of words you can use to replace to say in phrases such as “the professor says.” Your group might include to discuss, focus on, point out, elaborate on, and state. On the other hand, if you are preparing to study statistics in an English-speaking university, you might group together words such as analyze, data, estimate, derive, and factor.

Finally, in addition to using a list, you may also want to gather your new vocabulary words from material that you listen to or read. It’s a bit of a challenge when you’re listening, since you may not know how to spell the unknown word (unless you have captioning on a video). Your English teacher or English-speaking friend might be able to help here. And whether you’re listening or reading, focus on those words that you encounter more than once. If it’s a specialized word, it may not be a priority to learn. But if you meet up with it fairly often, your fluency will definitely improve if you add it to your vocabulary list.

So now that I’ve discussed several ways that you can collect new words to study, what’s the best way to actually learn them? I’ll discuss that in my next post.

Everyone learning a new language wants, and needs to, acquire new words. Words are the building blocks of our language. Without improving your vocabulary, you won’t be able to read, write, speak, or understand what you hear.

Given that learning new words is essential, how do we do this efficiently and effectively? In the next few posts, I’ll be discussing various aspects of mastering vocabulary. And I need to give a shout-out right now to Professor Kevin Flanigan, who teaches a course on vocabulary with Great Courses Plus and who has been inspiring me with new ideas during each lecture he gives.

First of all, it’s helpful to think about new words as if they were strangers who eventually become friends. By understanding this concept, you realize that learning a new vocabulary word isn’t a you-either-know-it-or-you-don’t situation. Our familiarity with words grows over time, just like a friendship.

Think about it this way. When you first encounter a new word in English, it’s like meeting someone for the first time. You might figure out a few things about this person from the people around him, or make some guesses about her based on what she’s wearing, but basically this is a stranger. Same with new words. We look at the context surrounding the word, notice things like whether it ends with an – ing or an – s, but we don’t really know what the word means.

However, if we spend time with this word, if we keep meeting up with it, and if we pay attention to it when we meet it in various settings, it’s like that person you keep running into at the bus-stop or your university class. The word is no longer a stranger. You know some things about it.

Finally, you make friends with that word. By encountering it enough times, or by looking it up in a dictionary, you feel more and more confident that you know what it means. And finally, you’re ready to actually use it – in writing or in speech. If it’s a best friend, you’ll even use it without needing to run it through that mental translator in your head: the one that takes words in your native language and processes them into English before you write or speak.

To help quantify your understanding of a particular word, you can use this scale developed by Edgar Dale, an educational researcher. From 1 to 4, he ranks vocabulary knowledge like this:

1. I do not know the word, and I have never seen it before.
2. I’ve heard of the word before, but I’m not sure what it means.
3. I know the word and can recognize and understand it while reading, but I probably wouldn’t feel comfortable using it in writing or speech.
4. I know the word well and can use it in writing and speaking.

In my next blog post, I’d like to discuss how to choose your friends in the first place. How do you most effectively select the right words to get to know? After that, I’ll offer four really helpful steps to help you move from 1 to 4 on the familiarity scale and turn strange words into friends.