How to increase your Russian vocabulary: 13 ways

How to increase your vocabulary in a short time? To do this, there are various exercises and techniques that do not require much time and effort. Read more, communicate with interesting people, be open to the world - these are the simple secrets of accumulating vocabulary. But this baggage will not burden the owner; on the contrary, it will bring benefit and respect.

About words

We often hear the expression “can’t put two words together.” The phrase is very offensive, and no one would like to hear it addressed to them.

Meanwhile, the current state of affairs is very depressing. Our vocabulary has been depleted to a measly 5,000 – 7,000 words. And the Russian language contains about 500,000 roots. This refers to sonorous words filled with meaning.

It would seem, for what purpose should one increase vocabulary? We can express our thoughts, choose a synonym to replace a forgotten word, and, in general, convey to our interlocutor the meaning of what was said.

However, the more extensive the vocabulary, the easier it is for a person to contact any audience.

If the audience is represented by smart, well-read people, a rich vocabulary will allow you to stand on the same level with them. And if the public is rather limited in perception, the lexicon will throw up simple words that allow you to explain the essence without unnecessary farce.

In any case, bright, varied speech charms, attracts and disposes. A well-spoken interlocutor has an undeniable advantage. By the way, according to studies, an extensive vocabulary significantly increases competitiveness.

We will talk about the most effective ways to replenish your vocabulary, which, moreover, bring joy and broaden your horizons.

Poetry

Many people don't take poetry seriously. But this genre works wonders in terms of developing beautiful speech and thinking. It is not for nothing that during ancient oratory competitions they recited poems by famous poets of that time.

Poems develop memory, teach you to express yourself easily and clearly. In an unfamiliar situation, you will quickly remember the right words, and in an argument you will not remain silent on the sidelines. Poetry sharpens diction. It’s not for nothing that people who have problems with pronunciation and are looking for an answer to the question: how to develop diction - memorize poetry - it’s like a type of tongue twister, only more meaningful.

Be sure to read:

Shakespeare's sonnets;
poems by A. S. Pushkin;
A. A. Akhmatova - collections of poems “Evening”, “The Running of Time”, “White Flock”;
M. Yu. Lermontov “Demon”;
I. A. Brodsky “Collected Works.”

An undoubted advantage of poetry is the variety of topics. There are poems about love, about nature, space, science, people's lives, society - this will undoubtedly quickly improve your horizons.

Exercises

Special exercises that need to be performed regularly will help increase your vocabulary.

Synonyms. We often use the same word without thinking that it can be replaced and give the expression a new color. For example, change the beloved word “cool” to “great, excellent, wonderful, luxurious, notable, mind-blowing, stunning, excellent, creditable.” Remember what words you repeat day after day and abandon them in favor of synonyms.
Retelling. If you watched an interesting movie or read a book, tell your friends about it. Try to make the retelling lively and detailed, achieve the absolute attention of your interlocutor, let the story captivate him. Ideally, the response to your half-unfinished retelling would be “Don’t tell me any more, I want to watch/read it myself!”
Parasite cleanup mission. We utter as many vermin words every day as there were no Colorado potato beetles in Colorado in 1859. These are absolutely unnecessary pests that do not carry any meaning. Usually a person says “well, sort of” when he can’t find a word. To avoid having to insert a filler word, it is better to remain silent, think, and then speak. By the way, another advantage of a rich vocabulary is that you don’t have to spend a lot of time finding the right word. The combo method is great for getting rid of parasites: they said a harmful word - throw money into the piggy bank. The benefits will be twice as great.

Clear the area

Before you begin to enrich your everyday vocabulary, you need to prepare a place in your mind and speech for new words—to clear the territory, so to speak. Up until now, we have somehow expressed our thoughts using a limited vocabulary, haven't we? With its help, we communicated with people of different ages and professions, described the essence of the most unimaginable problems to technical support staff, passed exams, had interviews, chatted with friends for hours... We succeeded in this thanks to a simple technique: when the required word was not found, its place in the sentence was taken by one of our favorite parasites. Parasites are usually considered to be such speech weeds as “well”, “here” and “as if”, but in our case this class should also include hundreds of chameleon words that can change meaning and connotation depending on the context. For example, the expression “I’m shocked” in a given situation can be deciphered as “I’m surprised / amazed / amazed / delighted / outraged / scared / stunned / jubilant / indignant / don’t understand / don’t accept / furious / hurt” and so on. Words like “thing”, “stuff”, “cool” are so capacious and universal that we can replace almost a third of a more highly specialized vocabulary with them. The record holder for the ability to replace absolutely any lexical unit is, naturally, the entire variety (or is it monotony?) of Russian swearing.

To feel how your active vocabulary is increasing every day, you need to force yourself to give up your favorite universal word substitutes and not be lazy each time choosing the very noun or adjective that most accurately conveys thoughts and feelings. Identifying unwanted elements in speech is easier than it seems: just carefully re-read your correspondence over the last week on WhatsApp, Facebook or any other messenger and make a list of the most frequently used words that you are used to plugging semantic holes. Hand the list to a friend or colleague and ask him to challenge you and make a note in his notebook every time a filler word slips into your speech or writing. For every 50 notes, you can treat a friend to lunch, or give him a bottle of champagne, or wash his car - without strict motivation, backed by economic or labor sanctions, it will be difficult to part with your favorite hackneyed words. It is likely that when you learn to slow down every time you try to say “crap” or “cute,” your memory itself will begin to throw up meaningful literary synonyms from a passive dictionary.

Reading

Reading is one of the best ways to increase your vocabulary.

Of course, we are talking about quality literature, and not about cheap heart-warming novels or monotonously meaningless detective stories.

High-quality literature means not only domestic and foreign classics. Someone will like the 4th volume of “War and Peace”, and someone in the process of reading this will want to repeat the fate of Anna Karenina. Reading should be a pleasure, you just need to find an author you like. Evgeny Grishkovets, Boris Akunin, Sergei Lukyanenko - this is a small list of modern authors whose works are worth paying attention to.

Philosophy

This genre is no longer as popular as it used to be. But we must not forget about him; philosophy is a whole storehouse of knowledge about how a person works, how he interacts with the world. You will learn more about yourself, your thinking, and learn to perceive society correctly. Often, after reading philosophy, a person completely changed his worldview - he became completely different.

Check out these books:

I. Kant “Critique of Pure Reason”, “Critique of Practical Reason”, “Fundamentals of the Metaphysics of Morals”, “Critique of the Power of Judgment”;
F. Nietzsche “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, “Beyond Good and Evil”, “Antichrist”;
Aristotle "Metaphysics";
A. Schopenhauer “The World as Will and Representation.”

Philosophy is not given to everyone. It is quite possible that you like books of a different genre. It doesn’t matter: you can develop speech using almost any source. However, philosophical materials can be an excellent start for those who have consciously decided to change their lives for the better.

Communication with smart people

Being in society, we, like sponges, absorb the vocabulary of the people with whom we constantly communicate. It’s unfortunate to absorb words like “in short” and “like” from friends or colleagues. It happens that there is nothing to absorb, since the interlocutor’s arsenal is a ringing vocabulary void.

Try to move in educated circles, at least sometimes. You don't have to put on a suit and point your boots in the direction of scientific symposiums. Smart people are in our environment, even if they are acquaintances of acquaintances.

Parasite words

These include cliches, obscene language, colloquialisms and interjections. Frequently using expressions such as “to be funny”, “to show off”, “real/unreal” or “cool” is not at all so cool. Say goodbye to the drawn-out “uh-uh”, “well-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o” or “this is the very thing...”.

Yes, sometimes we don’t even notice how we fill our entire speech with them. Record your speech on a voice recorder or camera, listen to sent voicemails and re-read messages from instant messengers. Ask your family and friends to be more attentive and bolder, don’t be shy about correcting or even shaming them once again.

Scanwords and crosswords

There is a common opinion about the uselessness of scanwords: they are only suitable for security guards in supermarkets.

In fact, scanwords and crosswords allow you to learn a lot of new words, often unusual ones, and, at the same time, understand their meaning. A simple newspaper or smartphone app will help improve your analytical skills and expand your vocabulary arsenal.

Poems, quotes, sayings, aphorisms

Let's start with the fact that at school we learned poetry not because “the teacher asked.” Thus, they began to train their memory and expand their vocabulary.

We are sure that everyone has a film or book that is remembered by a certain phrase or quote from one of the characters. We come across an interesting statement on the Internet and immediately “screen” it on our phone. But why clutter up your smartphone’s memory when you can have a special notepad and write down everything that particularly caught your attention. Both memory and benefit.

Be interested in other people's speech

Different age, gender, national, and social groups use words that are unique to them.

These could be professionalisms at work, colloquialisms of the older generation, buzzwords of young people. The characteristics and expressiveness of speech often determine a person’s character, his habits, knowledge, and experience.

In any case, we are constantly spinning in a whirlpool of familiar and unfamiliar words, filled with meaning and empty. Another person's speech can be a great way to increase your vocabulary. Our social nature allows us to exchange useful things, including words or phrases.

When is am is used?

So am can only be used with I, not in any other case. We put Are if the subject is you, we, they and words that can be replaced by these pronouns (people, eggs, “you and I”, etc.) Is appears only after he, she, it and the words replaced by them (Kate, a boy, an apple, a cow, etc.)

Interesting materials:

How many fights does Emelianenko have? How many bonuses are awarded in DNS? How much to charge for 1000 characters? How much is 1 manat in Russian rubles? What is 5% of 20,000? How much is 5 thousand rubles in Belarusian rubles? How much will it cost to get a sleeve tattoo? How much will the new Niva cost? How much will it cost to play paintball in Kaliningrad? How much will the parcel cost by cash on delivery?

Adviсe

We have looked at proven ways to increase your vocabulary, and finally, a few tips:

Learn poetry. Even a quatrain a day will allow you to accumulate a significant number of new words and entire expressions. In addition, poetry perfectly trains memory and helps in the prevention of Alzheimer's disease.
Write letters. How we have lost the habit of writing regular paper letters to friends and loved ones. But this is a luxurious way to look at your speech from the outside. Rereading the letter several times, you understand which words should not be used, where to replace them with synonyms, to add depth and sophistication. And letters are romantic and original.
Expand the boundaries of communication. The world constantly surprises with its diversity, including the variety of words. A thirst for new things, openness to people around you and events can nourish your vocabulary and simply color your life with all the colors of the rainbow.

How many vocabulary units are there in Russian?

Linguists have not decided on general criteria for compiling dictionaries, so the number of words varies:

BAS (Big Academic Dictionary) - 131,257;
V. I. Dahl’s dictionary - 200,000;
Ozhegov's dictionary - 57,000.

Below is the number of speech turns in the vocabulary of the average citizen:

first grade student - 2 thousand;
student - 10 thousand;
professor - 50 thousand.

It turns out that people touch on a small fraction of the richness of the lexical fund of the language in everyday use. Vocabulary growth progresses at a rate of one vocabulary unit per week. What techniques will speed up the process of “absorption” of lexemes?

“When you read authors who write well, you get used to speaking well,” Voltaire.

Books are a source of knowledge and an exciting hobby. Reading develops and enriches speech. However, not every book is useful for the development of intelligence. There are recognized authors who have created masterpieces that fully reveal the beauty of the Great Russian language.

Conclusion

To have a rich vocabulary means to have an instrument to influence the minds and hearts of people. Subconsciously, we are always drawn to people who are able to express thoughts colorfully and fully. To increase your vocabulary, read more, communicate, solve crosswords, learn foreign languages. New words, and with them new knowledge, will be a help in any life situation.

What do you think: is it necessary to expand the boundaries of the vocabulary? Do you know effective ways? Write in the comments and don’t forget to rate the article.

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Author of the article Elena Simakina Lawyer

Olga Gromova “No Bib”

The series was developed specifically for children and includes, in addition to “No Bibika,” the books “Top-Top,” “Boom,” “Don’t Cry, Bunny” and others. You will be able to talk to your child by showing him pictures and engaging him in communication with gestures and words. Kids enjoy participating in games and, along the way, learn new phenomena, objects and their names.

The book contains colorful, large illustrations that are accessible to children. Simple texts compiled by a specialist are interesting to children and encourage them to pronounce new words. In addition to the main text, the book contains recommendations for parents to help teach their child to communicate with words and gestures.