Dear intellectuals of Veeky Forums

Dear intellectuals of Veeky Forums,

how did you manage to expand your vocabulary? Did you pic up all new expressions just by reading or did you write stuff down and actually learn it?

I can't seem to memorize anything, my writing becomes worse and worse.
When I was a child, my teachers and my parents used to tell me that my writing was excellent, which lead me to write a lot when I was small.

Now years later I feel like I am the most untalented cockroach that has ever existet. I don't know what to do to improve my writing, I love writing more than everything ( I read a lot) and everytime I write a story, I am so unsatisfied. I feel so miserable and I am to stupid to frame my thoughts.

read an encyclopedia/dictionary (no fedora tip)

fun and more useful than reading fiction

But that doesn't add the words to my active vocabulary, right ?

Tons of reading literary fiction and constant trips to the thesaurus and dictionary. I love learning new words and even though you don't always have to be fancy with language, you'll find that perfect moment to use a word with complex meaning and it will elevate your sentence/paragraph dramatically. Keep cramming the ol noggin full of masterful prose.

Real talk, here's how you learn vocabulary.

(1) Download a vocab app for your phone. Most of the decent ones automatically adjust the learning algorithm to your performance, and these help you learn the exact definition of a word (which often you cannot fully get just by guessing from context).

(2) Read the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Economist, etc. These will reinforce and help you learn to deploy vocabulary. You should be reading these periodicals any way (or at least something like them.) You can get 12 issues of New Yorker and Economist for like $2-5.

SOURCE: I'm a trained GRE tutor on the side to make $$$ and also am way smarter than you.

Learning new words is worthless without using them. Your vocabulary will naturally expand by reading certain words and using them. Use dictionary apps and read verbose authors.
Keep incorporating more words into your speech and writing, but use them adequately (don't be the cunt who throws complex terminology and obsolete words around just for the sake of a refined aesthetic).

Fuck all that noise above. Just read a lot and look up every word you don't understand.

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If you want to do a reading-only approach, you need to do the following: stop on every single word you don't know 100% fully, guess its precise meaning as best you can from surrounding context, then look it up.

The problem here is that you don't get reinforcement for words since a rare word crops up like once in a book. Hence why I suggested the app. That's especially important if vocab doesn't come naturally to you (which appears to be the case for OP)

I write down every word i don't know the meaning of, or words i especially like the sound of.
Next step is to sort them and write down the definition and maybe an example in a notepad, but u haven't gotten around to it because i'm lazy as fuck.

just consume vast amounts of books, I always just guessed words I didn't know from context and if I couldn't I would look that shit up
ever notice how you learn a new word and then you see it everywhere it's weird as fuck

the best way to learn vocab is start reading works that are really old like from the 1800's and before you'll encounter allot of vocab that we don't use anymore
then just figure out the words by context or look them up if you have to

If OP's worried about improving their writing though vocabulary isn't what makes writing good. Vocab doesn't make a book good, nice dialogue and an interesting plot do.

Literally just read more. I want to add It's the same with languages. You can study Spanish in a classroom and after 5 years I daresay you wouldn't even be competent, reading Spanish however really shows you some of the smaller nuances in the text and grammar in context as well as applicable vocab to use during conversation

My parents pushed learning vocab on my early in life. My mom volunteered as a teaching assistant when I was in grade school, and used the opportunity to create more difficult spelling and vocabulary quizzes for me and the handful of others students who were ahead of the rest of the class, so i had an uncommon advantage there.
It wasn't all beneficial though, I came off as a pretentious fuck in middle and high school because people thought I was shoe-horning difficult words into everyday conversation just to seem more intelligent. That got so bad that I had to learn to dumb down my speech to become a passable normie.

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>intellectuals
>Veeky Forums

Also you seem to imply that you want to expand your vocabulary because it'll make you better at writing. Some of the most accomplished authors and works are elegantly simple. Vocabulary is only necessary insofar as it's a tool to help explain nuance and feeling. It also ought to vary by context (e.g. you wouldn't use formal, business vocabulary and syntax in a love letter).

My advice would be just to look up words you don't know when you see them. This is what I've done since I was a young teenager, I'm 22 now, and I've got a large repertoire of words to choose from when I write -- but only if I find that they're going to be essential to what I'm trying to express.

Basically read > become exposed to a variety of styles and words > learn > develop your own unique style through repetition

look up words in an etymological dictionary

then find associated words which traveled up from that same root. make sure you understand the prefixes and suffixes of the words and what they mean in their original language. if the word evolved from a verb look at its conjugation table, make sure you begin to understand the conjugation patterns of the major Romance and Germanic languages.learn the greek alphabet and learn to identify a word's origins by its prefixes and suffixes and the way it is pluralized or the sounds it possesses.

don't just read a lot of fiction, make sure you are reading a lot of science texts and philosophical texts. learn the origins of the words used there and think about them literally as well as with the contexts through which they glom additional meaning

make sure you are absorbing lots of slang and jargon too, not just from contemporary English but throughout history and across disciplines

best way for foreign languages:

buy bilingual poetry collections, and decipher and memorize the poems

>(1) Download a vocab app for your phone. Most of the decent ones automatically adjust the learning algorithm to your performance, and these help you learn the exact definition of a word (which often you cannot fully get just by guessing from context).

don't do this, you'll have no feel for the words you are using. this will help you score big on the GRE but will not make you a powerful and effective writer.

you'll end up like those people who drop expensive words awkwardly into their cheap writing/conversation or worse you'll end up writing like you have a thesaurus in your hand. it's really not just about knowing expensive words, it's about knowing the words to use along side them and how to contextualize them to ensure they deliver their full force to the reader and appear natural.

also this above method is inefficient. you are basically brute forcing your vocabulary. if you start thinking about language and words as an organic system of influences and migrations and pay attention to etymology you will end up learning more words faster by understanding their mutual roots.

What I try to do is whenever I learn a new word is write it down, and write a short paragraph containing that word at a later date. Learning by doing is the best, I think. And it works for me.

When I read a word I dont know the meaning of, I look it up and memorize it.

If your memory is bad you might be depressed or have some other health-related problem.

That's why I said you have to do it alongside reading non-fiction, you insufferable dumb fuck. LMAO

I lookup the dictionary definition every single time I read a new word

>Dear intellectuals of Veeky Forums