How to Build Your Vocabulary as an Adult – Daily Simple Practices

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As soon as school and college ends, an adult stops being a learner. No need to complain, it is just the way it goes. You are using the vocabulary suitable for your social and professional environment without any development due to the lack of pressure.
Reading and checking definitions is the right advice, but there is no actual practice behind it. And it is not about changing drastically your behavior, it is about slight change in your everyday life.

Why traditional methods do not work
Email with word-a-day takes place during the time you are doing something else. You read the definition, feel curious for a second, but then you forget about the word. Exposition does not help much.
Application with words has the same approach – you are looking at the words for a second and then either ignoring them or trying to memorize them. Most of them include test of recognition, but not of production. Thus they are less efficient.
Reading with a dictionary is a decent practice, but it needs time that is exactly what adults lack.
Listing the words works similarly to spelling lists for kids – it requires a review, and it is a retrieval practice.
Overall they rely on exposition – showing you something that gives a feeling of familiarity and does not help to improve retrieval in the future.

How things really work
Testing effect is one of the most proven findings of memory science. Process of retrieval is more effective than exposition, and effort is the key point.
It is all about struggling during the process of retrieval and failure to find something. Method that provides you with an immediate answer misses the whole point of the process of learning.

How is it different from the guessing game
Puzzle is a retrieval practice that was wrapped in a game. You have the constraints and have no choices; the word will never appear until you retrieve it from your memory.
And it works in a special way – it helps you to practice the retrieval pathway that other methods do not use at all. Normally we retrieve words by their meaning – we want to say something and a word pops out. But puzzle requires us to retrieve the word by its form, and it is a totally different process.
That is why it is hard and unlike the conversation, and that is why it trains the retrieval pathway that creates problems in tip-of-the-tongue situations.

Honesty limitation
Guessing games will not help you to learn the meaning of the word. It makes no sense in the format where you have to know the definition, only the spelling of the word. This is a huge mistake to use the puzzle as a vocabulary training.
What it does is making the words you already know more accessible and introducing you to words you did not know before. It is useful, but requires some additional element to build your vocabulary.

A daily habit that really works
HabitTimeWhat it builds
Playing several rounds at 6 or 7 letters10 minutesRetrieval speed, exposure to long words
Looking up any unknown word15 secondsMeaning, attached at the best possible moment
Reading something above your usual level15 minutesEncounter the words in context
Using new word in writing1 minuteThe only one that actually fixes itSecond row is the crucial one. If you met a word that you cannot retrieve, you become extremely susceptible to learning it. Because you have tried to retrieve this word six times already, moment when the definition of this particular word pops out is the most valuable.
Fourth row is the moment when the word transfers from passive to active vocabulary. Reading a word makes it recognizable. Using it makes it yours.

Why the word length matters
If you want to learn new words, the setting with 5 letters is not the best choice.
Most common five letter words you know already, the interesting territory starts with 6 and 7 letters words. It is the territory where you start to meet suffixes, derived words and words that are on the border of your vocabulary.
Wordle Unlimited lets you to set the length of the word from 3 to 7 letters at wordleunlimited.dev, and only the increase of the length makes the game productive. It becomes harder, but this is the point.
Unlimited rounds work for the same reason. Thirty puzzles a month is not a vocabulary habit. Ten minutes a day with seven letters is.

Realistic expectations
You will not enlarge your vocabulary significantly in a month, and anyone who promises you that sells you something.
What you will get is the incremental learning of the words you already know something about, increase of your retrieval speed under stress and encounter with words that are a bit beyond your vocabulary range. It will sum up to something visible in a year.
The point of success is not that the method is smart, it is that 10 minutes a day is something you will do.