How to learn new words in English

There you are! Seated at your desk with a paper in your hand which contains a list of words that you need to memorize for tomorrow’s English test, you need to get a good grade so you don't lose the money you spent paying the English school and of course you want to learn English, that was actually the reason for you to decide to go there, but how boring and stressful it is to memorize words, if there was only another way to learn and memorize vocabulary! You might think. 

Memorizing English words is an old and worthless method that most schools and institutes apply when teaching English in order to improve and expand students vocabulary, it all consists on you, reading the words many times until you memorize what they mean and the way you should pronounce them, but is this a natural and powerful way to learn how to speak English? No it's not, in fact, if you do this, you will be forcing your brain to learn the language, perhaps you will learn the words and their meanings, but it is not going to be easy to use the words when you try to speak, and it will take longer until you can use the words fluently.

My advice for you is to not worry too much about learning and memorizing many words, and instead try to focus on listening to English, the more English you internalize the more words you will know in a natural way, however, if you don't understand some word in a sentence, don't think about it individually, but think about the whole sentence, go to the dictionary, look up for the word you don't understand and memorize the sentence, not the single word.

Don't use translators or dictionaries too much, try to focus your efforts to learn English to always be similar than the way natural learning should be and this is done by listening. When I was starting to learn how to speak English on my own, I remember when I learned the word “awesome” I used to watch a comedy on TV and they said the word “awesome” very often, so because I used to watch this TV show a lot I started to notice this word and I could see that this word was used on positive situations, when I heard the expression “that's awesome”, for me it was something like “that's good” or “cool!” or maybe “amazing”. I knew how the word sounded, I could even say it, I had a feeling of what it meant, but still I didn't know the exact translation in Spanish (my native language) and I didn’t know how to write it.

FOCUS ON LISTENING

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BE PATIENT

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DO NOT MEMORIZE SINGLE WORDS

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FOCUS ON FULL SENTENCES 

What I did to solve my problem was go to the internet and then type “synonyms for amazing” and I found the word “awesome” and what it actually meant was what I thought it meant and now I found out the exact translation of “awesome” into Spanish, but I never memorized the word because I wanted it to go to my mind, it came to my brain naturally and it did because of the many times I heard the word on the TV show, and that is exactly what we all need to do if we want to learn how to speak English.

REMEMBER: DON'T FORCE YOUR BRAIN TO LEARN WORDS, JUST LET THE ENGLISH COME NATURALLY TO YOU.