In recent years, as we all know, English is widespread in China and even all over the world. Many people spare no effort to learn it with reciting tens of thousands of English words crazily during the whole learning process. I am not the exception. We students have been learning English since we were in primary school. It seems that the most basic challenge is to memorize words. But how can we recite English words without too much difficulty? Just take my own experience as an example.
When I was in elementary school, out of curiosity, I seemed to be a little interested in the fresh language so memorizing words, the number of which was not large, was not very boring. I would recite them through their special pronunciation and associate their pronunciation with Chinese characters. For instance, when I came across the word “luggage”, I would write down the Chinese one “拉给纸” next to it and just remember the Chinese pronunciation. Nevertheless, when I made great attempts to remember the meaning of the word “jaw”, I would connect its pronunciation with the Chinese character “嚼” and imagined when we chew something, our jaw must be moving. This method made English more interesting and brought me a good beginning to accept English words. Then, in the middle school, with my understanding to English getting deeper, I found it easier to memorize them through the phonetic symbol. As my accumulation of words became larger, I summarized some regular patterns. For example, the letter “a” can be pronounced as “/ei/” or “/e/” or some others, so we can write down the words according to their phonetic symbol. But there is an important premise, that is, you must be familiar enough with the word, because it can avoid you write down the wrong letter which has the same phonetic symbol to the right one, because once you learn a large number of words, it may lead you to making some unobvious mistakes in this way. However, during the high school, with some English organizations coming into existence such as the New Orient and Li Yang crazy English, some good methods of reciting English words have been known by more people. One is the method of imagination. Let’s take the word “imitate” as an example. “Imitate” consists of three parts: im + it (它) + ate (吃). We can imagine that there is an animal, the pronoun of which is “it”, “ate” something by learning others. That is “imitate”. One more example——“breeze”. When we try to remember that word, we can connect it with the word “freeze”. We can imagine that in spring a warm breeze can melt the frozen river, which can make it easier and vivid to learn English words. Another method is to remember compound words which are made up by more than two words. For example, deadline is made up by the word “dead” and “line” and aircraft is made up by “air” and “craft” and so on.
But when I stepped into the university and have been majoring in English, with the number of my vocabulary becoming larger and larger, I found that more often than not, I can not remember the meaning of many words that I have recited again and again. And to distinguish the different meaning between the words that seem similar have been difficulty for me, too. As a result, I have not stopped looking for other useful methods to remember words until I took the class of study of words. I have learnt a helpful method to distinguish the meaning of unfamiliar words, especially useful when doing some reading. That is, we can guess the word meaning by its component (roots or affixes) and some sense relations. While we come across a complete unfamiliar word “amorphous”, we can divide it into two parts: “a-” and “-morphous”. After we take the lesson, we can know that the prefix “a-” means without and “-morph-” means shape or form and the suffix “-ous” means this word is an adjective. So we can successfully guess the meaning of the word “amorphous” is without shape. In addition, we can guess the meaning of “pseudonym” in the same way. “-seudo-” means fake and “-onym” means name or word. Then we can try to think about what is fake name? That is the writer’s name used when he writes. What an interesting thing!
To conclude, there are many different way to remember new words and no matter what methods you are using now to memorize English words, try to find the most suitable way for you. Then that is the most useful method!
