In order to learn advanced words, you must use advanced listening and reading resources, and once you find an unknown word you have to not only translate it but also see it in context in order to be able to use it correctly. You should also put it into practice immediately by using it in a conversation or in an exercise.
How is learning advanced vocabulary different from learning beginner vocabulary? What are advanced words?
Beginner words are words that are more practical they are used in everyday life to achieve practical result. Chores, food, time related words, appearance, hobbies, movements are all beginner categories. Words related to complex concepts and abstract things are more advanced. Words to describe complex emotions in detail for example (gloomy, exuberant) are more advanced. Words of topics specific to certain fields are also in this category. Biology, sciences, business are good examples.
Learning a beginner word is more simple as you only have to translate it and then use it in a sentence or learn it in a way that does not involve your native language. That’s it.
When it comes to more advanced words, you should understand, that they usually have a very specific undertone to them. Take good as a basic beginner example and satisfactory and exceptional as more of an advanced example. You could use good in the place of both advanced synonyms but satisfactory and exceptional are not interchangeable as they mean slightly different things and can and should be used in very different scenarios.
The other difficulty with advanced words is that you don’t get as much exposure to them, and might not have to use them often. After all, we hear and use the words, good, food and sleep a lot, but when was the last time you have heard tenacious, pliability or perfunctory. See what I mean? It is the same in your target language as well. At the end of my post I give you exercises that you can use to practice and listen to advanced vocabulary to help you with this.
Where can you find advanced words to learn?
As I have mentioned, hearing advanced speech is far less common. You must expose yourself to such a type of language intentionally. In Overcome the intermediate language learning plateau and How you go from intermediate to advanced in a language? I also talk about the fact that you should change your listening and reading resources once you get on the next level. You should read news magazines, scientific magazines, and art magazines and listen to intellectual, entertaining podcasts, tv channels, and YouTube channels.
Look for texts that contain unknown words, even if not a lot of them. At this level, you should strive to understand every word of a text or speech instead of strengthening your ability to understand texts and speech with relatively many unknown words as you did at intermediate level.
An other way to find new words is to look up and learn synonyms for words you already know. Think of a random word, look up its synonyms and learn one of them! This will help you to express yourself more precisely.
What should you pay attention to when you are learning advanced words?
As I’ve briefly mentioned above, the biggest difference lies in the nuances in the meaning of the words that are more advanced. To understand the meaning of ‘table’ is very simple, it is an object, that is it. But splendid? And what about spectacular? It is important to see these kind of words in context in order to understand them.
A step-by-step guide to learning a new advanced word
I start with what most language learners do: open Google Translate. First thing I always do is to listen to the pronunciation by clicking on the speaker icon. It is avaiable in most languages and even if it isn’t like in the case of Hawaiian, make sure to listen to it with the help of other websites.
Once I roughly understand the meaning I make sure to look at a monoligual description of the word in my target language. In case of popular languages you can simply put the word in Google. Not Google Translate, in the search engine. I do not use any other word after it, just the word. A result bar will show up at the top of the page, with the description highlighted. I case of less known languages you should still be able to find similar resources on the internet.
You should not skip this step, as this would be your resource and way to understand the nuances that I have mentioned previously.
The final step is to see the word in cotext, this way I know exactly how to use it. This completes the 360 degrees research of the word. I personally love using *Liguee for this. *not sponsored
Exercises to practice advanced vocabulary
I promised you that I would give you examples of exercises you can do to practice advanced vocabulary, so here they are. Have fun doing them 🙂
I hope you feel equipped now to tackle more advanced words.
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