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- Hello, everyone.
And welcome back to English With Lucy.
Don't worry, guys.
It is me this time.
Not my weird Lucy replica in the form of Allie
for a proper teach me.
That was a lot of fun.
I'm glad you liked it.
The response was honestly hilarious.
I had a blast.
So who has been with me since the very beginning
of English With Lucy?
Not that many people.
I had, well, I had very few.
It took me a couple of months to get to 1000 subscribers.
But my second ever video was a video called
How to Learn and Remember Vocabulary.
The video's a little bit disorganised.
It was my second video ever.
I was 21 years old,
and I was eager to get onto You Tube
and share this knowledge that I had.
But the video's done really, really well,
but looking back at the video,
there are some updates that I would like to add on
because that teaches you how
to learn and remember vocabulary.
It's a great method.
But it doesn't teach you how to expand
and widen your vocabulary,
which is something that could benefit
basically everyone.
I want to expand my vocabulary in my mother tongue,
my native language, which is English.
And I also want to expand my vocabulary in my
second and third languages, Spanish and Italian.
And maybe even Portuguese.
If you haven't seen my video about Portuguese yet,
check up there.
Yeah, so this is a video that will be useful
for both native speakers and non-native speakers.
I want to share with you some tips that I've picked up,
some pieces of advice,
but it's not going to be your typical
How to Improve Your Vocabulary video.
Oh, read books.
Oh, watch films.
I want to give you some tips that are really, really
gonna help that you might not have thought of before.
So bear with me.
Before we get started,
I'd just like to thank the sponsor of today's video.
It is lingoda.
Lingoda is an on-line language academy
where you can learn English, Spanish, French, and German.
They only used real native teachers.
You sign up on a monthly basis
through subscription packages,
and you get a mixture of group and private video
sort of Skype lessons.
They've given me a special discount for you.
You can get 50 dollars or 50 euros off
your first month at lingoda.
All you have to do is click on the link
in the description box
and use the code that's in the description box as well.
Right.
Let's get started with the video.
So my first tip is don't get overwhelmed.
When I think I want to expand my vocabulary,
I feel overwhelmed.
I just think, oh my god.
There are so many words.
And there are so many words that I'm lacking
in my vocabulary.
How on earth am I going to learn them all?
You need to realise that it's not humanly possible
to swallow and regurgitate the full Oxford Dictionary
unless you have a fabulous gag reflex.
Joke.
I've seen a couple of comments on some of my videos
from people saying,
"I like to read the dictionary before I go to bed,"
which if your mind is capable of doing that
and you can read a little bit of the dictionary
each day and take in, wow!
I take my hat off to you because that's
really, really impressive amount of dedication
you have there.
I personally cannot do that.
So I recommend that you chunk your vocabulary learning
into three sections,
and you focus your time and energy and effort into
learning the vocabulary from these three sections.
It's not as complicated as it sounds.
Section one, topics you are interested in.
I am interested in gardening,
so I like to watch gardening videos,
and I have picked up loads and loads and loads
of vocabulary, especially Latin terms actually for plants,
just through watching videos and doing research
and reading books.
So yes, reading books, watching films, watching videos
is a great technique.
Make sure you're focusing,
so you're choosing a video that will help you
expand your vocabulary and you're absorbing it,
and then you're applying what you learned
in my previous video,
How to Learn and Remember Vocabulary.
Basically, you're keeping a vocabulary diary,
and you're being really, really aware and meticulous
about words that you don't know already.
Don't let anything slide.
If you don't know that word,
you find out what it means,
and you write it down in your phone or in a book.
It doesn't matter.
Just make sure you are meticulous.
Section number two, vocabulary that you use
and come across on a daily basis.
Now why do I say use and come across?
There's two different parts of vocabulary expansion.
There's seeing a word that you don't know,
and learning what it means.
But there's also taking words you already know,
and finding alternative ways of saying them.
Synonyms, for example.
So it's really, really useful to look into synonyms.
There may be words that you're using every single day.
For me, a bit of a problem is the word like.
So you're your using some words every day all day.
Like the word like, for example.
Like the word like.
And you will sound much more eloquent
if you find alternatives,
and you switch between the alternatives.
Words that you come across on a daily basis,
things in the news,
political terms.
If it's, you know, for example when the Brexit
was going on, I learnt loads of political vocabulary
because I was coming across the terms on a daily basis.
I was reading the newspaper.
I was watching the news.
I was very conscious of the fact that
I didn't totally understand what was going on,
so I made myself understand,
both on a political level and a vocabulary level.
And section number three, my favourite section,
random spontaneous randomness is, you know,
where you sit down and you think,
"I wonder what that extra toe on the back
"of a dog's leg that doesn't work is called."
Your brain wanders.
Use it to your advantage.
Use it to improve your vocabulary
and find out what it means.
Now, the next one,
the next point that I want to talk about.
I know I've already said that I don't want to say
read books, watch films.
But what I'm going to say is read books and watch films,
but not in the normal way.
Everyone knows that if you read a book,
your vocabulary will improve.
If you watch a film,
your vocabulary will improve.
I want you to think first,
about in your language,
what is a good vocabulary.
What makes one person sound eloquent
and another person sound uneducated.
So I want you to really pick and choose carefully
which authors you read
and which people you listen to.
Now I don't mean cut out people that you find uneducated.
I mean dedicate a couple of minutes every day,