The use of vocabulary

I think memorizing the vocabulary is not too difficulty if you work hard. But it will make you very frustrated that you don’t think of the word in the sentence though you know the word. This situation often takes place on me in my high school because the first part of the examination is usually about the vocabulary-blank-in. And some freshmen also tell me this situation after their first test. I think we all cannot associate the sentence with the vocabularies which appear in the textbook even though we have just memorized them several minutes before. Even sometimes I have to think about the order of the vocabulary list to fit possible word into the sentence, and I think it is not ok. And I don’t really know the vocabulary.

In fact, many teachers have tried to help me to solve this problem and provide me some methods. For example, teacher will hope we can learn vocabulary in context, not to isolating words or focusing on dictionary definition. That is to say, you know the word by reading a sentence, and you will understand and memorize the word when it appears many times in context, even you can use it to make up your own sentence. And that means you really know the word.

Besides, teacher usually tell us not to use electronic pocket dictionaries, especially you just get a easy and clear Chinese meaning for the vocabulary. But this habit doesn’t easily be corrected for students because of the convenience and instance of the electronic pocket. In my opinion, maybe because I am a student, I don’t absolutely oppose that we can not use the electronic dictionary. But I think we should learn to know the word by know its English definition and example sentence. Maybe that will help us not to persist in the Chinese meaning and restrict our association.