A vocabulary routine for PTE that fits into twenty minutes

Copying out sixty words on Sunday and recognising ten of them by Wednesday is what the long-list method usually delivers. The other fifty will not come to you in a sentence, let alone under a timer. This routine works the other way round: five words a day, each met in a sentence, used, recorded and brought back at the right moment.

The twenty-minute routine

1. Collect (3 minutes). Choose five words from something you read or heard today: an article, a lecture, a page of your coursebook. Copy each word with the sentence it came in.
2. Check (5 minutes). Look each word up in a learner's dictionary. Note its part of speech, two or three words that often go with it (its collocations) and the other members of its family.
3. Write (5 minutes). Write one sentence per word about your own life or studies. Do not copy the dictionary's example.
4. Say (4 minutes). Read your five sentences aloud and record them on your phone. Play them back once and listen to where the stress falls.
5. Review (3 minutes). Cover the words you met 1, 3 and 7 days ago. Say each one, spell it and fill the gap in your old sentence from memory. A word you cannot recall goes into a new batch with a fresh sentence.

Before the day ends, use at least two of the five words in something you say aloud: a Describe Image answer, or a short retelling of what you read. A word you have used in a real answer is easier to find again than one you only copied.

One word, followed all the way through

Take "regulate".

The sentence is about something you could actually say, and it uses a collocation, not just the word. That matters in tasks where you choose the right form or the right partner for a gap. Knowing that "regulation" is a noun, and that people comply with it, is worth more than a one-line definition.

Pick a topic and stay with it

Academic passages and essay prompts often come from a handful of familiar areas: the environment, technology, health, education and work. Choose one area for the week and take your five daily words from it. By Saturday you have around thirty words that belong together, which helps them stay put, and you can reuse them in a speaking answer or an essay on the same theme.

On the Monday of a technology week, your five might be automate, reliable, access, privacy and upgrade. Even that short set carries things to learn. Reliable brings reliably, reliability and the verb rely on, with its preposition attached, and access usually wants a "to" after it.

Resist the long list. Fifty rare words copied from a website teach you what the words look like, not how to use them. Two common words you can use correctly are worth more than five rare ones you cannot pronounce.

Learn the family, and say the family

Words change shape, and their stress moves with them. Economy is stressed on its second syllable, economic on its third, and economist goes back to the second. If you only ever see these words on a page, you will not notice, and a Read Aloud passage will find you out. Recording yourself is the only reliable check: listen for where the stress falls, check the dictionary's audio when you are unsure, then say the word three times and record it again.

Families help in reading too. A blank before "growth" in a sentence about a region's wealth needs economic, and economical is the near-twin that a blank can tempt you into choosing. You will spot the difference faster if you have met the whole family together.

Tonight

Take five words from today's reading and run the routine once. Tomorrow's first review is already waiting. For how word families speed up reading, see academic word families: reading faster by knowing more, and when you want to see your new words under a timer, try the practice tests on this site.