How to fancify your language in no easy steps

This is a guest post by Anna Pakhomova, my C2 Proficiency student whose skillful use of fancy language will completely blow you away. In this post, she shares her story and her tips.

  

I realize how disgustingly self-assured this sounds, so I’ll just go ahead and burst my own bubble here. In this guest post, graciously suggested by Irina, I’ll try to show the darker, duller and more mundane part of putting together your own personal toolbox (or, more precisely, a warehouse) of fancy lexis.

First off, the way I learned most of my so-called “fancy” vocabulary was by being a decidedly lonely kid at school. I was a full package – I wore thick glasses, had braces permanently in, and was too smart for my own good. At that point, reading virtual tons of books and learning English was my super power, my magical shield against the world I didn’t particularly enjoy. It wasn’t that I was bullied – oh, I was unapproachable in my little ivory tower. It’s just that I, as any self-respecting teenager, Did Not Fit In ™ and channeled it saturninely into reading and learning. This is the second major component of my “success story” – in my great escape into English, I was emotionally involved in learning to an extent that now, looking back, I can only define as bordering on unhealthy.

In this next part of my story, I’ll give a comparison of the things I used to do as a sad whizz-kid leafing away in my bedroom, and the things that I feel might work for real people in their quest for acquiring more sophisticated vocabulary. 

Learning the Hard Way

My go-to technique with every book I read was keeping a very basic vocabulary notebook, with each page divided with various degrees of neatness into two columns, wherein I would put things down as I went along. It was the second step that set me apart from most learners and the twenty-first century as a whole – I would look up every definition in an actual paper dictionary. Tedious and bewildering though it may seem, it provided for the extent of language exposure that surpassed looking words up online. I would simply encounter more lexis by flicking through, and would more often than not be stuck catatonically poring over the lexical items I wasn’t even in search of in the first place. In short, I reveled and basked in language in my every dive into the dictionary.

The next stage was to try and find good use for the bulk of lexis I’d accommodated (we’re talking dozens of ye old 48-page “general notebooks” each year. I guess I just liked the feel of pouring English onto paper). This recycling and internalizing stage was a two-tier process. The first option implied composing an unspeakably cringy young-adult novel, the single driving force of which were the words I had on any given vocabulary notebook page and needed to weave into the story.

Looking back, I’m not sure how well that worked for me, because it was clearly a very mechanistic process. What really did help internalize the majority of the new vocabulary was writing a fantastically preposterous teenage diary, where I would aspire to (and almost succeed at) becoming something of a Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Stephen Fry all rolled into one. Needless to say, I can hardly revisit it now without puking, but I have to admit that at that point I had a much more extensive working vocabulary than I do now (to say nothing of style). It’s just that now I’m discouraged from using it by the virtue of having become a regular person. 

Learning Realistically

Getting back to normal people – what can I possibly borrow from my teenage self as an advice to other learners, without making anybody cringe to death? Here are some principles (borrowed from Scott Thornbury’s blogpost), that correspond with the ingredients of my old recipe, but are more permissive and realistic:

1. The Principle of Multiple Encounters. 

As a teenager, I would often enough learn and retain words simply by seeing them over and over in different contexts. This surely isn’t going to work for people who don’t have the luxury of nothing better to do, so I suggest condensing the resource material in the following way. Let’s say you have (or you are) a Business English student with a vested interest in time management and snowed under by email overload. I would suggest feeding this very specific query (something like “emails are controlling my day”) into Google and picking out the blogposts and articles that are titled in the most similar way. This way, you would get the double or triple exposure to the relevant vocabulary, seeing that most articles starting with “How to…” tend to reiterate the same ideas in similar linguistic ways.

2. The Principle of Cognitive Depth. 

This implies that we need to manipulate the new vocabulary, think about it, wallow in it and soak it in. In a digital world that has irrevocably moved on from using any kind of paper dictionaries, I would suggest turning to corpora, be it the British National Corpus (BNC) or the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). For me, the allure of the corpora lies in the intriguing randomness of sentence examples all thrown together into one thread. Guessing where they came from and comparing the shades of meaning in each example can be an exciting part of your vocabulary quest.

A less time-consuming option is a corpus-based online vocabulary tool. My personal favorite is Wordhippo. The examples in the “Sentences” tab consistently make my jaw drop, so this is really the place to go if you’re looking for curious advanced contexts and collocations. The main advantage of this tool is that it provides for piecemeal albeit meaningful contact with language. What with the ever-present data overload we all experience today, looking up a fixed number of advanced examples of your selected vocabulary items seems to be just enough for a modern learner to handle.

3. The Principle of Re-Contextualization. 

This is the stage where we need to find good use for the vocabulary we’ve amassed – the stage that provokes the most difficulty and debates in the ELT. Even as I was bent on learning as a teenager, creating artificial contexts for my lexical discoveries didn’t really yield result. Thankfully, I was self-absorbed enough to keep a diary, and that’s where the real need for communicating my authentic meaning stemmed from. But there is no way any adult person can be given to scribbling their day-to-day into a secret notebook. The key, then, is to find a topic or build a learning habit intrinsically connected to how we feel and what defines us a person. For example, I once was, in the confines of my own diary, an aspiring and daring woman of letters, inspired by the finest figures of English literature. Giving this image life on paper was what helped my vocabulary stick. Selfless love for everything English was what made me keep digging for more. Being a sad and peculiar schoolkid was what gave me the vastness of motivation and time to do it.

The truth is, I’m none of those things anymore. I’ve grown myself a life and sometimes need to time myself on FlatTomato to keep myself in line when I have to write essays. I haven’t kept a proper vocabulary notebook for six years. I’ve swapped reading for watching. It just doesn’t come easily anymore. But the lack of time and sadness, I hope to believe, is redeemed by the unperturbed infatuation with all things English, which is what keeps my eyes open for more fanciness wherever I look.



Image credit: Photo by Ryan Wallace on Unsplash