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How to improve your vocabulary

Case 2. Gathering and organizing your own vocabulary material in four easy steps

1...Imagine you're in New York, on a businesstrip or just as tourist.
You need some money and have to go to a bank...
But, there's only a large place with automated machines.
You try to find your way through all the buttons and descriptions but it's really a pain and just with some help of a nice New Yorker, you finally manage to get some money.
You don't want this to happen a second time.
What you're going to do now?

2. Coming home you get your laptop and you open your browser. You start googlin' to find a nice, comprehensive article about money, atm's, banking in general.
An article in your own, native language!

Most obvious thing to do now after this is to put something relevant in the Google search-box like:

"banking terms", "banking definitions or terminology", or "atm getting money" etc.
You have to be creative.

Google will present you lots of hits and it's up to you to choose a page with a lot of banking terms.

3. Now go and write down all the relevant words you can find referred to banking terms. You can do this either using just a paper notebook or any text-application in your computer.
To have the words translated into English you can follow a few strategies:

• you can use a pocket dicitionary
• you can use a freeware translation program like Lingoes. Any key-combination+rightclick will show a translation of any highlighted word.
• you can use a browser add on like qtl to translate any word by simply doubleclicking any word in your browser!


[Hold your mouse over the yellow area to open two pictures showing how both options work]

4. Now get your flashcard program and create a new file called something like "Banking terminology".
If possible, try to put the new-to-memorize-words on the flashcards in a context, a simple sentence.
Adding pictures is a good idea for visual learner, while auditory learners might benefit from adding sound; the pronunciation of the words.

Don't overload your flashcard file: 20 cards per file should be enough: it's better to memorize in small portions than long extended lists.
It's much more important to train each small portion on a regular basis during a long period.

Using this strategy consequently every time you cannot find the right word or phrase, can quickly help you to build your very personal vocabulary.