You can improve your vocabulary by creating your own personal dictionary or card system.

• Why should I write my own personal dictionary/vocabulary book?
• How will it save me time?
• Show me an example
• How to write your own computer dictionary
• How to use a card system

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Why should I write my own personal dictionary/vocabulary book?

• You can put in important information that is not in other dictionaries. For example,

• you can put in information in any language

• you can put in pictures

• you can put the sentence where you first found the word, and translate the whole sentence

• you can put in collocations (words that often go together; e.g. a light meal)

• you can put in different connotations (words which describe the same thing, but give you a good or bad impression; e.g. 'freedom fighter' and 'terrorist').

• you can put in different parts of speech for the same headword ( headword is an entry in a dictionary, e.g. jump. You could put in jump, jumped, jumping, and jumper.

• you can compare how to use the word in English and in your own language, for example, Cantonese has a word for cup, but English divides cups into cups, mugs, beakers and glasses.

• you can put in whether the word is formal or informal; e.g. 'a meeting' or 'a get-together'

• you can put in whether the word is derogatory (rude) you can put it any other useful information, for example where you first heard the word.

It is faster. See below:

How will it save me time?

Using your own dictionary is faster because:

• it only contains words you need, so it has fewer entries and you don't need to search so much for a word

• you can put in words that are not headwords in a normal dictionary, such as 'jumped', rather than 'jump'

• you can put the words in any order, for example you can group together all the technical words about your academic subject. Therefore you should use a book where you can insert pages at any point, like a ring binder.

• you can put information from different types of dictionary together in one entry, for example, information from technical, picture, mono-lingual and bi-lingual dictionaries. Therefore you only need to look in one dictionary to find all the information.

• you can write abbreviations in full, so you don't need to check the meaning in the front or back of the dictionary. For example, you can write 'Uncountable noun' instead of [U]

Show me an example

Here are example pages for:

• a noun
• an expression
• an adjective
• an adverb
• an idiom

A Noun

An Expression

An Adjective

An Adverb

An Idiom

Using a card system

A card system is the same as a personal dictionary / vocabulary notebook, but each entry is on a separate card. This means you can order the cards into 3 sections:

• Section One: Words you have learned already and you know.
• Section Two: Words you have learned already and you want to revise.
• Section Three: Words you are learning now.

As you learn more vocabulary from the cards, you can move them from Section One to Section Two, and then to Section Three.

Here is an example card:

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Different 'parts of speech' (noun/adjective/verb/adverb etc.) for the same headword

Writing your own computer dictionary / vocabulary notebook

Why?

1. So that you can tell the computer to find the word, you don't have to waste time looking it up.
2. So that you don't have to write it by hand, copy and paste the text and pictures into your dictionary from other documents on your computer or on the Internet, for example from the Virtual Language Centre's Lexicon, or on-line dictionaries.
3. The more you think about the words you are learning, the better you will remember them.

There are 3 main ways to write your own computer dictionary:

1. Using a word-processor program:
   Put all of your dictionary in one word-processing document, and use the 'Find' menu option (Control-F) in the 'Edit' menu to find the word you are looking for. If your dictionary is very big you can put the entries in more than one document, grouped together in a 'dictionary' directory/folder, and then search all the files/documents in that directory/folder using a file manager program or the search function of the 'Open' dialogue box in your word-processor.
   .
   For example, fill in the 'Text or Property:' box near the bottom, then press the 'Find Now' button in the bottom left-hand corner. See the picture below:
   
   

      2. Using the Internet:

     3. Using a database program: