Sparing no effort to survive the Exam

Hey guys.
Welcome to my second blogpost on strategies how to improve my vocab and survive PC2. I've been reading a handful of blogposts of fellow classmates and I decided to try out a new dictionary. Also, I am going to tell you how I will master studying the words of the Porter book. So first of all: the new dictionary.

New Dictionary

The Collins Dictionary

So far, I have been using the dictionaries of Merriam Webster and Cambridge a lot as well as the vocabulary.com website. Now that I've tried out a few more online dictionaries, I'd like to share one with you that I found very helpful.
The Collins Dictionary allows you to decide whether you want to look up a word in a British or in an American dictionary. It provides a very short, but useful explanation of a word. I like this because sometimes, when a dictionary provides too many explanations, it gets even more complicated than it already is. Right next to the explanation, there are strong collocations provided, which also comes in very handy. If you are interested in the origins of the word, you can see those beneath the definitions. The Collins dictionary also shows synonyms and a direct link to the website's thesaurus. In addition to that, they offer translations in various languages. In some cases, it is helpful to not only look up a word in a monolingual, but also in a bilingual dictionary. Aaand what's the icing on the cake is that you can also see example sentences, very similar to the ones on vocabulary.com.
I highly recommend the Collins Dictionary as it has proven itself as very useful to me.

The two most important strategies how to study the Porter words

1. Repetition is the key

Vocabulary.com App

Using the vocabulary.com app was actually not a suggestion from a colleague, but from one of my English teachers. At first, I wasn't sure if I want to spend two euros on an application I will probably either not like or not use - or even both. I know that two euros is not a lot of money. But considering it is exactly the same like the website vocabulary.com, two euros are actually a lot. Why buying an app for my mobile phone while I can use the website for free?
In the end, I decided to download the app and just give it a try. And guess what. I LOVE IT <3
The app provides the exact same information squeezed on a mobile phone screen. I use it whenever I am on the bus, on the train or even when I am doing a shift as a paramedic, waiting for a call. I'm sure my colleagues think I am a total nerd studying vocabulary during a night shift. If only they knew that a lot of nights look the same in a Translation student's life. Sorry, I am going off on a tangent...
So about the disadvantages of this app. I'd like to mention two: First, the costs of course. Not everyone is willing to pay for an app since almost every app we use is free. And second, sometimes the speaker-button where you can listen to the word's pronunciation is not always working. But I don't know if this is the app's fault or it's just my crappy phone. Do you have any experiences with the app?

Anki App

When I first installed the Anki software on my laptop a few months ago, it didn't exactly work well. I think there was some kind of a bug so I couldn't use it properly. After reading through some blogposts of my student colleagues, I felt like installing and trying it again. They all said that it works perfectly and that they benefit from using it, so I downloaded the mobile app AnkiDroid Flashcards. And it worked! Woohooo. So that's how I became an Anki user. Why I benefit from using it?
I like that the app gives you the possibility to choose on your own what you want to put on the back of a flashcard. I am saying put because you can either write a definition, a translation, add an image or even an audio file. So you could add a voice note where you yourself pronounce the word - correctly of course.

What I do most of the time, however, is adding an English definition including synonyms and collocations. That's what helps me the most to learn a word. In rare cases, I also add a German translation.

Sooo, I recommend this app as well as the vocabulary.com app. The good thing about Anki is that it's free and you can either use the mobile app or the software.  In general, I'd say that using a mobile app to learn vocabulary is very practical. You can do it wherever and whenever you want: on the bus, on the train or, like I do, even during night shifts.

2. A spoonful at a time

Another important thing when it comes to mastering such a huge amount of words is to study the words in pieces - to somehow classify or cateogrize them. It's up to you how you like to classify them. I don't have a particular way of classifying them, but I study the Porter words unit per unit. Not bearing in mind how many words need to be learned in total helps a lot not to go bonkers. What is more is that it's a good feeling to complete a unit and be able to say that you've just learned a bundle of new words.

Also, I make use of the vocabulary sheets at the end of every unit. Not only do I highlight words I don't know, but also write them and their meaning down. I also add collocations and synonyms in order to remember the words more easily. On the second photo you can see the vocabulary sheet of the fourth unit. Let's take the word "sphere" as an example. I wrote "closed surface of round shape" and "area/sector/field" as short explanations and added "social sphere" as a collocation. Of course, this way of writing down vocab is not everyone's cup of tea. For me, however, it works quite well.

Thaat's it. I hope you enjoyed reading this blog post. You'll hear from me very soon as I still need to write a second post on pronunciation ;-) CU!