How to Memorize English Words.doc

How to Memorize English Words ? With the acceleration of globalization, English has boosted a hit throughout the world. That is,there has appeared a dramatic increase in the number of people learning English as a foreign language,of which Chinese people account for a large proportion.With more people starting to learn English,new problems have arisen.Now it is a popular phenomenon that many English learners in China complain about the difficulties of English learning,especially the vocabulary.We know that there are about 1,000,000 English words ,of which 170,000 are most frequently used.Without words, we cannot make up a phrase,a sentence,a paragraph or an article.So we English learners must attach great importance to English vocabulary. However,what methods should we Chinese English learners employ to memorize words and build a large vocabulary?Since I have learned English for eight years,I have some experience to share with you. I began studying English from junior school.It was the first time that I had contacted with English. And I was totally at sea with English at that time.Not even knowing how to pronounce a word correctly,I just repeat reading every letter of it and write it down for several times to memorize it.But I would forget it very soon. And we know it is what we call mechanical memory. It turns out to be an ineffective way. Later,I was taught the international phonetic symbols.Though I could not truly understand them,I still felt the power of them. One day,when I came across the word “father”, I seemed to be enlightened suddenly.Thinking that “a” usually pronounces /a:/ behind letter “f”, “th” usually pronounces / / and “er” usually pronounces / /,I quickly came up with the right spelling.From then on, I began to pay more attention on the phenetic rules and I found it a useful way to memorize words via their pronunciation.I had used this way for my whole high school and I benefited a lot from this way. By this way,we have to know the accurate pronunciation of the words .And we know that it is the phenetic symbols that will decide the the pronunciation of words.So it is important to have a good command of the phenetic rules.If we know the rules,we will be able to pronounce a word correctly and then we will be able to spell it correctly. However,there are few occasions where the rules are not applicable.Sometimes we will meet with words which do not keep to the general rules, such as rendezvous,silhouette,psychology,honest,etc.For these special words,we just need to pay more attention to them.After all,they do not make up a large proportion of English vocabulary. Now I am in college and every day I will come across a large number of new words.So it became even more difficult to memorize all the words.But after I have learned a new subject called lexicology,things become easier.In this book,it divides words into roots and affixes.So if we know the meanings of the roots and affixes,we will estimate the meanings of words.It is really helpful when we come across new words.Though its hard to memorize the meanings of all the roots, we will improve a lot if we make it. By the way,I also benefited a lot form other ways of memorizing words.One way is to visualize what the words look like.For example,there are different words depicting different kind of ships such as boat,canoe,ship,vessel.If we portray what each of them looks like in our mind when we are memorizing them,we will not mix them and will use them correctly. Another way is to use our imagination and sense of humor to create some interesting phrases or sentences to imprint them in our mind.To illustrate,we can memorize “business” by thinking of “Two ss(snakes) and a e(goose) are sitting in a bus ”.And in the film American Dreams in China,the protagonist ChengDongqing employed homophonic to teach his students to memorize words,such as “ambulance”(In Chinese,we say “An Bu Neng Si”,so it is “JiuHuChe”). I have to point out that all the ways mentioned above are just my suggestions.We should bear in mind that the most important thing is to find out what is the best way to us.Only if we adopt the most suitable way can we memorize words more efficiently. No matter what way you choose,we cannot ignore the fact that practice makes perfect.There is rarely the case when we can keep along memory of a word if we only memorize it once.Therefor,we should review the words we have memorized for several times so that we can keep our memory longer. In addition,the ultimate purpose for memorizing words is to apply