I have a semi-decent vocabulary, but it's not as good as I want it to be.

I went about three years without reading anything which is the great factor which lead me to forget a bunch of previously-acquired words.

What I do now is I read with a thesaurus beside me. When I come across a word I don't know/forgot the meaning of, I turn to my thesaurus. This has helped me improve my vocabulary. Regularly reaching for the thesaurus can become tedious, but it pays off.

How large of a vocabulary do you have? Do you have any vocabulary-building strategies?

I occasionally look up a word that's driving me nuts, but I try and infer the meaning as much as possible. Doing this actually makes it easier to remember the meaning.

I haven't really tried much to actively expand my English vocabulary, although I did buy like Six Weeks to Words of Power and all those books when I was in highschool. Never got very far. It's better to just learn from reading than it is doing those things, anyways. I've considered using an SRS for it before, but haven't yet done so. I doubt I'd really stick to it, as I'm not intelligent enough to handle being pretentious. Which is really the main reason for having a huge vocabulary, to be a pretentious asshole.

Usually if I encounter a word I don't understand I just search up the word on the fly as I'm chatting. Gotta love Google.

I save new words in Mnemosyne. It's my language database.

My vocabulary in swedish is somewhere just above average but still far from large. In english it's average and in japanese it's still restricted to some 7000 words all in all, not counting conjugations or polite forms.

My english is like a multi-storey building made of sticks. Eloquent and pedantic but poorly phrased. I dislike this fact. Through japanese I learned a more minimalistic way of expressing myself, such as removing excessive words and using punctuation more frequently, but this doesn't always work well with english. Japanese has become my antidote kind of. It has a therapeutic effect on me in many ways.

I'm not a big fan of any type of pedantic or eloquent use of language. This includes the styles of Chair, Reanimator and Saigyo as well. Even though they are native speakers and use english better than I do. I prefer Chair's drunk MSN language to his formal forum language.

The style of expression I prefer and want to strive towards achieving is minimalistic but still efficient. Like Aikido or Karate in relation to Kung Fu, or a wooden flute or clay ocarina in relation to a metallic pipe organ. This doesn't necessarily require a large vocabulary. Spoken language to me is more an obstacle than a useful tool. I would prefer intuitive telephatic communication.

My use of words make me feel self loathing. The above text being no exception.

"Eloquent" was meant to be "elaborate" in my case btw.

I think I have a pretty good vocabulary, but it's only really evident in essays I write for school & other things. That's because I actually think about what I'm writing. When it comes to stuff like leaving replies on forums, I don't normally pay attention to wat I'm writing, so long as I think it makes sense. I still occasionally come across a word I've never heard before & then I either google it if I'm on the computer or look in one of my dictionaries.

It's probably average. I don't particularly care about the size of my vocabulary. I wouldn't waste my time consciously expanding it. I'm able to communicate effectively and that's good enough for me.

I don't have a very good vocabulary...well not as good as it should be. Ascetic and alacrity were two I had to look up the other day, but sometimes even more common everyday words throw me. I think its just a symptom of not having a great memory.

vocab????? words are for skool!

primordial grunting was the height of human communication

On my native language (Finnish), I'm confident that my vocabulary is above average. Especially in speech. In writing I always feel like I'm repeating myself with no sign of an end, though. When it comes to English, I used to think my vocabulary as good but I have found myself getting more and more lost without a dictionary. I realised this especially when I was studying (or trying to study) for English philology exams. Not actively memorising the language is of course behind the deterioration. As are memory problems. The situation is the opposite compared to my native language, English is easier to write than use in speech.

The other two languages I have knowledge of (Swedish, Japanese)... well, the situation with them is unfortunately very poor.

I've read a book which greatly improved my vocabulary.



Great book!