How Reddit helped me improve my vocabulary
About a month ago, in quarantine, I realized it was about time I address my hours of rabbit-holing on Reddit and Instagram. I thought about deleting the app from my phone. Fact is, that never works(for me at least). So, abstinence was totally out of the picture.
Secondly, being a college graduate, and not being able to work is the biggest agony one could possibly endure. I simply spent my day binge-watching animes and wasting time looking at memes on reddit and squabbling with randoms in video games.
So, it occurred to me: If am not able to refrain myself from using reddit, how about I use it in a rather productive manner?
I found this question on quora. how can i use reddit efficiently?
The top answer has all the great subreddits consolidated. NGL, the names on some of those subreddits had me utterly intrigued.
Some of them which I actively read are:
r/AskReddit
r/dataisbeautiful
r/TodayILearned
r/fitness
r/WritingPrompts
r/blogs
r/MurderedByWords
This list is still dwarfed by all the more amazing content yet to be discovered on Reddit. Nonetheless, looking at these aforementioned subreddits and talking to native English speakers on the comments have acutely improved my passive vocabulary over the last few weeks,not to mention that I have been working on my vocabulary over a year now.
Some of these subreddits really had me enthralled and I was invested on them for hours. Every time I found something useful or new(words or even idioms), I’d screenshot it right away and jot it down on my journal. I’d actively comment on discussions.
Apart from these subreddits, there are also some other humorous subreddits which I look at intermittently:
r/funny
r/pics
r/memes
r/WhatCouldGoWrong
r/WatchPeopleDieInside
and many more..
A Final word
Learning vocabulary is a hefty and a continuous task as memorizing those unusual words might be difficult for a non-native English speaker.Therefore, many jump ship. Using them is the only way to improve your passive vocabulary.
Considering someone who actually wants to start working on their vocabulary, using a social media app like reddit might completely go against the conventional prescription of reading a dictionary or finding new words from news articles and seems almost impractical, here’s something to buttress my opinion.
Going through a dictionary will surely introduce you to new words, but an app like reddit will show how native English speakers use it in their sentences and that abets the process of getting yourself well acquainted with those words.
And that’s about it. Thanks for reading, until next time!
