Active and passive vocabulary

Vocabulary is a collection of all the words that a person owns. It is generally believed that a wide vocabulary is inherent in the most educated people, as well as writers.

Active and passive vocabulary

Active vocabulary is the words that a person uses in a speech when he speaks or writes. For different people, this indicator can vary very much. All the words of the language do not know and nobody uses.

The active vocabulary of a junior student is about two thousand words, by the end of the institute this figure is increasing, at least five times! "Dictionary of the language of Pushkin", which includes all the words used by the great poet in works, contains about 20 thousand words.

Passive vocabulary is the words that a person does not use, but he understands if he sees or hears them. As a rule, they are many times greater than words that are part of the active vocabulary. This includes various terms, words of limited use (jargon, archaisms or neologisms), just rather rare and unusual words.

It's funny that with the vocabulary of the Russian language in about half a million words, we are actively using by us not more than 6 thousand, which is about 90% of human speech, and only 10% are rarely used.

The concept of active and passive vocabulary is used in linguistics and literature, as well as in pedagogical and clinical psychology. Teachers also use it. At school, they teach that vocabulary should be replenished, and for this read a little more. It's true. Reading is the best way to replenish your passive lexical baggage. Moreover, the most pleasant, because people are watching the twists and turns of the plot, while words are remembered themselves. But not every book is suitable for this. It is necessary to take good literature, you can classics, otherwise there is a risk to run into the author, who has the lowest vocabulary: he has nothing to learn, you can teach him yourself!

Another way is to search for unfamiliar words in the dictionary. In principle, it is not necessary to rush through the dictionary Ozhegova in search of the right word - on the Internet there are appropriate resources, which are very convenient to use. But, although you will know the meaning of the word in any case, there are more chances that you will remember it when using a paper dictionary. The search itself, which will take more time and effort, will strengthen the word in memory more firmly, because it will be constantly repeated mentally while the person is in search.