Learning more vocabulary doesn’t necessarily make you fluent in English.

In fact, memorising more words in an attempt to be better at English is actually a big mistake that a lot of people make.

And the problem actually isn’t that you don’t have enough vocabulary… it’s that you’ve got no idea how to combine these words into native-like units of English to use in conversations.

So that’s the main thing you should focus on if you want to be fluent in English (here’s a free guide I created that shows you how to do this).

This said, however, that doesn’t mean knowing more is bad. Learning more vocabulary is always going to be better than knowing less vocabulary. Kind of like money: if you have a lot, it’s always going to be a good thing. But if you think that money can make you happy… obviously it won’t. But it’s still nice to have it. Same with vocabulary. You won’t be able to be fluent in English automatically if you know a lot of words… but it’s good to know more vocabulary all the same.

So, yes, learning more vocabulary is a good thing.

But again, don’t make learning vocabulary your ONLY primary focus. It does depend on each and every person to a certain extent but in my experience, most people don’t actually need more vocabulary… they need better chunking skills.

Here’s a free guide I wrote that shows you how to do this.

Hope that helps.

Best,
Dr Julian Northbrook