How can we improve our vocabulary?

From the moment I discovered that becoming a professional interpreter was my calling, I faced one of the central problems of language learning: acquiring and mastering vocabulary.

I believe it is unnecessary to dwell on the importance of enriching one’s vocabulary except to reflect on the words of Ryszard Kapuscinski:

“I had understood that the more words I knew, the richer, fuller, and more varied the world around me would appear.”

While I was aware of how essential it was to quickly acquire the vocabulary of a language and use it correctly, I was equally uncertain about the most effective ways to study and memorize it.

While studying at university, I adopted what I believed to be an effective method (the only one I had thoroughly tested at the time) based on the ad nauseam repetition of words and expressions to be memorized:
from an A4 sheet, I created two columns titled “language 1” and “language 2,” which I filled with endless lists of phrases and their corresponding translations in parallel.

As effective as it may be in the short term, such a method, if it can be called that, is extremely inefficient and short-sighted.

Ineffective because it is characterized by a negative cost-benefit ratio:

in the face of the enormous effort of transcription and memorization, the benefit, although satisfactory in the short term, did not prove to be adequate.

After a few years, I would have expected that the hours spent mechanically memorizing long lists of words would have etched indelible grooves in my memory, allowing me to easily access the vocabulary I was building, even years later.

In reality, this method, as systematic as it was, lacked organizational rigor.

Although the words were grouped into lists based on semantic criteria, there was no real mental archive in which to place them and no technique to determine when to review them and how many times to do so in order to remember them easily.

Since then, I have embarked on a path of experimentation based on thorough research, seemingly unrelated to linguistics, that led me to discover and practice the effectiveness of memory palaces and spaced repetition.

Mindful of the effort and heaviness of mechanical memorization, I was determined to develop a system that was easy to apply, efficient, and rewarding, optimizing the language learning experience while minimizing the frustration that inevitably arises in any growth process.

Memory palaces and spaced repetition serve two essential functions for learning, regardless of the subject matter:
giving structure to knowledge by placing it in a specific mental location or “locus” so that it is easily retrievable, and systematically reviewing it at precise intervals to consolidate it in long-term memory.

One entertaining way to enrich one’s vocabulary is reading. If your aim is to master the vocabulary of a foreign language, I recommend you try reading parallel texts.

Check this out: https://corpora.actionableknowledge.net/

There are two parts to this question:

the first one concerns the sources from where you acquire new vocabulary—which include reading books, magazines, newspapers, listening to podcasts, audiobooks, etc.

The second part deals with how you learn vocabulary effectively.

This is where building 26 memory palaces, one for each of the 26 letters of the English alphabet, comes into place, provided that the language you are learning has such a thing as an alphabet.