How To Overcome Difficult Words

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You may often see people holding dictionaries everywhere, but not grammar books! And there is a reason behind that. Every language has thousands of words that you may have uncovered a part of, but you’re still on your way to uncover more.

And here is when you encounter new difficult words that you can’t get a grip on; you might find them hard to pronounce or maybe you can’t even remember their letters.

And that’s normal…

Because when you learn a new language, you see it through the eyes of your own language. So you measure its length and difficulty through the rules of length and difficulty of your first language. And that’s what may hold you back.

But we won’t let that happen! So we gathered the most popular factors that hinder your progress in language learning and created a simple checklist to make sure nothing will stop you from confidently learning new words.

Solutions to Beat Difficult Words:

1. Create a Learning System

To make the word perfectly stick in your mind, try using a learning system that fits you. Learning systems are the way you understand, memorize, and apply this word. For example, you may first divide the word into syllables and memorize it. Or you try to understand the meaning of the word, and then repeat it over and over. It all depends on the learning system you choose or create.

Voxy is a perfect example; its system depends on personalization. This means that it teaches you in the way you would love to learn. So, if this desired word helps you in your life, Voxy will incorporate this word into normal situations that happen in your life so you can understand it better!

2. Define Your Goals of Learning

Why are you learning this language? How will these new words benefit you? Knowing your exact goals will help you learn better and will make you avoid unnecessary parts of learning.

If you are, for example, learning this specific language for your work, then you will learn related words to this field. Therefore, any difficult word will be easier to learn when you are applying it in your daily work, because you’re not just learning in a vacuum, you’re learning for a specific reason and goal. 

3. Know How to Pronounce Correctly

Pronunciation isn’t just saying the letters in the right order. It goes further beyond that. Every word has its own way of being said, and there is a way to put stress on the right part of the word.

Because where you put the stress in the words is what creates a different accent from the natives. So you have to make sure you listen to the word clearly to make it easy for you to pronounce it right.

Besides the stress, there are also syllables. You need to know the syllables of every word whether it’s a word of 2 syllables or 10. This repeated word dividing will help you pronounce the word easily without the need to stop for a while to remember its letters and parts.

4. Find Its Synonyms

There are synonyms to mostly every word. So when you face a hard word to understand, immediately find its synonyms and they will make it easier because you know what you can exchange this word with. 

You can put this word in a sentence, then you replace it with one of its synonyms, and then do it again. You will notice that you began to understand it more deeply, and that you can also use it in real life situations without so much effort.

5. Apply What You Learn (Or Trying to Learn)

As we’ve said before, once you know how to use the words you’re learning, you will master them. Because the old way of teaching languages doesn’t work anymore, you have to personalize what you learn to fit your own needs.

This personalization affects your learning in a way that makes everything you learn flexible to apply in your life or work. So, your learning and your interests are on the same page.

That means no more repeating unnecessary words and no more learning what doesn’t benefit you. From now on, you will learn only what matters to you.

You love medicine and you’re learning English, so Voxy will teach you through videos about human anatomy (all in English).

You’re interested in literature, then Voxy will introduce you to a large number of novels written by the likes of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. That’s the way learning languages works now.

Now that you know how to learn new challenging or difficult words like a pro, it will be easy to retain them longer in your memory and maybe even start using them like easy normal words.

And because many of us encounter difficult words and then all we want to do is to avoid them, we need to be strong enough to keep trying and face these words by actually using them more often.

We tend to understand them, but we don’t have the courage to produce them, whether in writing or speaking. But that’s over now!

The next time you catch yourself doing so, grab this checklist and start confidently saying and noting such difficult words with the right pronunciation and spelling.