why you can remember so many English words?

Native speakers: this is how we learned language so it just comes naturally. And words we don't know, we look up. Chinese is similarly a puzzle for many English speakers cause it's so different from how our language functions. How do you remember so many symbols? That's strange to us. English as second language speakers: practice with native speakers.

As a native speaker of both English and Chinese (Cantonese, not Mandarin), I can assure you that Chinese is a lot more difficult. Remembering something stems from repetition and understanding. You can usually infer the meaning of a new word you’ve never seen before from the rest of the passage/paragraph, or by using a dictionary. And try to guess what a word means before you use the dictionary for the definition. After you see the same word being used in different contexts over and over, you’ll eventually remember what it means and how to use it.

Encountering them many times in different contexts over the course of your life. It reinforces the meaning in your memory so you can recall it again later. Roots of words can also help if you're a little unfamiliar with the word but know the root and other words it's related to. But also: dictionary. No shame in using a dictionary.

Well in English the form of the word sort of roughly corresponds to the way it sounds. English spelling is frankly not very great at representing the sounds, but it's close enough that people who know English well can in most cases figure out what an unfamiliar group of letters is supposed to represent. This is probably actually rather easier than trying to figure out the meaning of a Chinese word just on the basis of radicals. Eventually we just memorize all the word shapes, like readers of Chinese script do. And of course, related English words often do share part of their spelling shape. To build on your "tree or wood" example - "deadwood", "brushwood", "woodblock", "woodworm" "bloodwood", "matchwood", "firewood", "heartwood", "woodwinds", "cordwood", and others all have to do with "tree or wood", and all contain the word-shape "wood".

Don't memorise words. English is not a test. Communicating is not the Gaokao. China ranks terribly for English fluency, and it mostly comes down to how you "study" it, not "learn" it.

English also uses “word roots”, or parts of the word that form the structure. But it has *many* languages from which it borrows. Greek, Latin, and French are all a big part of English. As you become more familiar with it, you can see that structure. We even study it in school

Similar to how you can often guess from a Chinese character, you can often guess — just for different reasons. For example, from context, or from another, similar-sounding word that’s related. Of course, that one can be tricky — there are words that sound or look very similar that mean completely different — but again, context helps.

Some English words have common parts that originated from Greek or Latin, and if you learn those parts, it makes learning new words a lot easier. For instance, if you know that "co" means "together", then as long as you know what "operate" means, you can figure out what "cooperate" means: working together. Some words are just these "roots" chained together, like "xenophobic". "Xeno" means "strange/unknown/alien", "phob" means "fear/aversion", and "ic" means the word is an adjective. So if you know these roots, you know that "xenophobic" is an adjective that means "afraid of things that are different and new". I could even chain a bunch of these together and make up a new word like "xenomicrobiologiphilia", and if you know what each of those roots (xeno | micro | bio | logi | phil | ia) mean, you'd know it means "a love for the study of tiny alien life".

Here is my best explanation as a native English speaker with a degree in linguistics (but I do not speak any Chinese language or dialect at all). First, I think it’s useful to explain a bit about how language acquisition works. As you probably know, we all acquire our first language(s) from birth just by hearing it spoken around us, before we learn to read and write. So we all naturally develop this knowledge of “this sound has this meaning” even though the connection is completely random, whether your first language is English, Mandarin, or something else. (And it’s the same for sign languages, just with signs instead of sounds!) In English, letters and letter combos correspond somewhat closely to sounds, so when we learn to read, we do not “memorize” words by looking at them and thinking “oh, that shape means this, so I pronounce it like that.” Instead, we think “oh, that shape is pronounced like that, so it means this.” If you see an English word and you don’t already know what it means, you can still get a pretty good idea of how it is pronounced, and then you can ask someone what it means, or look it up. Sometimes, English words include “roots” (usually from other languages) that we know the meaning of, which can help you guess the meaning, like you described with Mandarin — but I think it’s way less common in English than in Mandarin.

With English you aren't memorizing the image of the word (the idea or meaning,) you're memorizing the image of the sound. English has hundreds of thousands of words, but only 26 letters, each of which only represent a few sounds, max. When we're little, we're taught to read words one letter at a time and match the group of sounds to words we already know by hearing them. There are plenty of exceptions and variations, and those are learned over time, but the principle is the same.

English vocabulary is very hard, because it comes from all over the place, and there isn't a lot of reason for it. \[Edited for clarity: English takes words from a lot of different languages, so it has root words from all over the place. This means that combinations of letters often occur in words with no common meaning.) Sadly, a lot of it is just memorization, along with some being able to figure out what a word means by the context of the words around it. A lot of native speakers learn words by encountering them and figuring out what they mean by what the rest of the words around them mean, although we also have dictionaries, which we use to look up words that we're unfamiliar with. (A very good online English dictionary is [M-W.com](http://M-W.com) . It will give both a fairly simple meaning, but it will also give you a lot of other information about the word.) Being able to determine a word's meaning by it's context is a very important skill in English, because it never goes away. We have a lot of words that sound alike, we have a lot of words with multiple meanings... and we even have some words that are spelled exactly the same as other, unrelated words. (For example, lead and lead, which are pronounced differently from each other, but are spelled the same. One is a metal, an element known mostly for being heavy; the other one means providing guidance or direction.)

We just do, though some words you can figure out more easily than others. There’s a lot of words that are derived from Greek and Latin, for example. If you know some of those languages you can ferret out what certain words mean. Take utopia, for example. In Ancient Greek, eu means good or well. Topos means place. Eu topos becomes eutopos, which becomes utopia. A *lot* of medical terms are formed this way. For example, tachycardia. Tacheos means quickly, kardia means heart. So tachycardia means fast heart.

It is more similar to how you remember a *spoken* word rather than a character. Our written words are modeled on the way they sound, so we memorize how the word sounds and the spelling is linked to that.

Latin letters do built a sort of word outfit. Yes. But people are reading them, this is something compleatly easy compared to Chinese signs that you actually have to know and remember.

In english if you don't know the word, you look at the root of the word and see if you can get any meaning from that based on other words with the same root that you do know. For example, if I didn't know the word "epidermis" I would look at the root of the word, 'derm' and think of other words with that root that I know, like dermatologist which means skin doctor. So I can safely assume "epidermis" means something to do with skin.

shit, my teacher never told me, English sounds is more important! I watch out you guys reply. it can be described like. go with the flow, don't think too much and similar with Chinese, remember some roots

Similarly to how you can guess the meaning of a character you don't know, you can sometimes guess a word based on its similarity to other words, or if you're familiar with certain common Latin or Greek roots you can figure it out.

Same , I from china too,but I only know 800english words ,Any suggestions?,I want improve English 🥺

Before we are familiar with the words, we sound them out. English is not as intuitive as some other languages like German, but the letters (and sometimes letter combinations) do represent sounds. For example, in the word "dog," an English speaker knows that the letter "d" virtually always makes the "d" sound, and "g" has a few possible sounds but only one of them is likely if it is used at the very end of the word like that. "O" is variable, but in a consonant-vowel-consonant pattern there's usually just one sound that fits. So we sound it out, we get "dog," and we sort of "hear" it. More complicated words just take longer, but they can be done (unless borrowed from French, in which case you're out of luck). After a while, you remember the look of the word from having read it before, and you don't have to sound out any word you recognize. This system DOES have problems. For example, English spelling is (sort of) standardized. Which means that in some dialects, the words are not spelled like they sound LOCALLY. I am near the Appalachian mountains of North America in the US. In our local dialect, for example, there is very little difference between the sound of the words "sit" and "set." (These particular words are also used in a somewhat nonstandard way.) It comes down to memorization in this case. There are a lot of reasons why my area typically has poor academic scores, most of them involving funding, but the fact that the spelling of some words is very far from what we hear when people say the word aloud—well, it sure doesn't HELP. There are some dialects and areas where the problem is even worse (Geechee people, also US, coastal region of South Carolina). Many of these groups are disadvantaged. The idea of "proper" English is a political issue in several countries and it can get very complicated, very fast. This also means that English writing CANNOT become like Chinese writing and bridge the gap between two mutually unintelligible dialects/languages. If the dialect drifts too far it will HAVE to change the spelling. (Scottish Twitter already does this. I would consider Scottish Twitter to be darned near the final boss of English, as it requires understanding English sounds well enough to sound out the words and then understanding English dialects well enough to decode what is actually being said, and to do this all with a reasonably good understanding of regional slang and cussing.) Still, the fact that English writing is a collection of SOUNDS rather than a collection of MEANINGS means that introducing children to basic literacy is not THAT difficult, which is a nice feature of our system. It involves less memorization and that makes it easy for young kids. I used to teach some of this stuff, so if it isn't making sense I can try to explain more.

I’m a native English speaker learning Japanese (which uses a lot of similar characters to Chinese) and I have grown to appreciate being able to guess what a word means based on the symbols.

We don't. English writing represents sounds, not words. So we don't memorize the words. We memorize the sounds that are made by 26 letters and 7 digraphs (the weird combinations of 2 letters that don't make the sound of the letters separately). From there, we form the word as we read. Nearly all native English speakers learn to read by vocalizing what they are reading as they are reading it.

It's a lot of words, but they're all made up of an alphabet of only 26 characters that make up only 44 phonetic sounds. With enough repetition, you can learn it!

Maybe etymology and word derivation can help you, because it looks like what you describe as guessing from a starting point. Looking etymology up, besides looking for definitions and pronunciation, may help you recognize patterns and learn new words without even knowing them. The word hippopotamus for example. It comes from Greek, and in Greek, Potamus means river and hippo means horse, a river horse, which is exactly what 河马 〔河馬〕means. Related to that word, there was a mythological creature in the Phoenician and Greek mythology called the *hippocampus* (马头鱼尾怪 〔馬頭魚尾怪〕), which was half horse half fish. From this word we have the genus of the seahorses (their scientific name start with Hippocampus) and we also have a part in our brain with the same name, because it has the shape of a seahorse (according to the guy who named it). These are just random and weird examples, I’m a nerd so I know these ones, but there are way simpler etymological facts that may help you learn new words. But we do have the adjective hippic, related to horse racing. Like idk library comes from liber (Latin), meaning book, it must be a place with books and librarian must be someone that works with books.

How can you remember all those characters?

Assuming you're talking about reading, we don't have to memorize the words. As long as we know the sounds the letters make (phonics) we can figure it out. In the US, there's a big controversy right now, because many schools were teaching students to just memorize words, which meant that when kids came to a word they'd never seen before, they couldn't figure out what it was. Now schools are going back to teaching phonics because everyone realizes that that's a much better system.

Just remember it from using, seeing and hearing. If we start talking at 4 and were 30 years old we have been speaking english for 26 years so its just a time thing. There are plenty of english words people don't know the meaning of or pronunciation so were not english gods or anything.

Let’s think about memory in the active context — writing instead of reading. Many years ago, before portable electronics were everywhere, an English-speaking student of Chinese literature wrote in his blog about not knowing how to write 喷嚏 (English ‘sneeze’). He was in a common area at school, writing a letter in Chinese, by hand. Postal mail was usual then. He asked his native Chinese friends for help. They were unsure about it. All of them were Chinese language concentrators, but in the moment no one could quite recall the characters. No dictionary was immediately available. Frustrated, he gave up and ended his letter without mentioning anything about sneezes. This could *never* happen with English, he said — that a small group of educated people would not instantly remember how to write a less-common but still familiar word. That does make writing in Chinese seem more demanding. I suffer as much as anyone with English spelling, but I can still guess at the spelling of a word I’ve never seen written before. I might make a mistake, and then people would laugh at me, but they could decode what I wrote phonetically.

Almost all people learn to speak before learning to write. So we remember them the same as you did. For the spelling, well there is some connection between the written and the spoken language, even though this is complex and has many exceptions in English, this helps.

I’ll give you a hint, you already have half of it. Think in images, not “words”. Search for origins and base forms of other words in new ones. There is a pattern. And it’s actually ironically not that far from Chinese’s pattern, it’s just not formatted the same way.

Part of how we do this is kind of the same as how you do. Visually, all our words are just jumbles of letters, but phonetically they are largely comprised of smaller parts that get used and reused. These roots, prefixes, suffixes, and other assorted modifiers get stitched together to create meaning, and even if you’re not consciously aware of it, they help you understand new and unfamiliar words made up of familiar components.

Just like you can recognize radicals when reading Chinese, there are root words and prefixes and suffixes in English that are the building blocks, so to speak. I think most people who speak English as a first language don't learn words like this, but it can be pretty helpful. I learned most of my vocabulary through reading A LOT, and then simply looking up new words. There's not really a trick except for becoming familiar with the building blocks and trying to guess based on those. But English is trickier because it's what I like to call a Frankenstein language; some words are Germanic, some are Latin, many come from French, and some are borrowed directly from other languages entirely so it's not always a foolproof method. 加油吧！

We mostly remember the letters, not the words.

There are quite a few words that share roots, and these are used to construct new words. For example, words related to blood: * hemoglobin, hematin, hemochemistry, hematoma: these all share the hemo- stem, which originates from Greek * sanguine, consanguinity, sanguinary: these terms come from Latin * blood, bleed, and all their related phrases: these come from Germanic Another well-known example has to do with cows: * beef, bovine, etc. originate from Latin * cattle, chattel, etc. also originate from Latin * In fact, both these words could trace back to the same Proto-Indo-European root Many words in philosophy, science, technology, etc. that have been constructed have Greek or Latin components. Consider television, telegraph, telephone, teleport, telecommunication--all these have to do with *tele-*, which comes from Greek and has to do with something *at a distance*.

A lot of our words also have smaller, recognizable pieces inside them, although it doesn't work exactly the same way. 🤔 It might be helpful to look up "Latin root words", "Greek root words", and "Germanic root words". When you learn a new English word, it's also a good idea to read its etymology (a history of how the word developed), which is included in most dictionaries.

Words that are common are mostly memorized by native speakers. However there are patterns and systems for more complicated words. One of the things kids are taught in schools are prefixes, suffixes, and root words. Overachiever can be split into Over-, Achieve, and -er Over- as a prefix means above or exceeding, Achieve is the root word meaning to accomplish something, -er means a person. So an overachiever is someone who exceeds the expected achievements. Forewarning -> Fore- means before or ahead of time, warn means to alert someone, -ing means an action. So a forewarning is the action of alerting someone ahead of time. A lot of words can be broken down like this.

I’m a native English speaker who has studied a little Chinese on Duolingo. I have had the *exact same thought* about Chinese characters - I have no idea how people can remember them all. It’s so easy for me to remember new English words, though!

There's no answer other than practice. Repetition — always the holy grail. This applies to whatever you're learning. But in the case of language learning, using the same words over and over again makes you get accustomed to the words you find difficult now — until they might as well be intuitive as breathing, and you get bored and move on to something new. It's a constant feedback loop that gets you, well, all those people who enjoy dropping 'salient' in random conversations. Anything else is addendum or someone talking out of their ass. Usually the latter.

Fun fun, English words have root meanings, for example, gress is walk, digress, aggressive, progress

I’m a native speaker in both English and Mandarin Chinese, my parents are Chinese but I was born in the States. I think a lot of it has to do with comfort and exposure to the language so that you can guess confidently. I’m learning Japanese and I realized that when I hear or see a word that I don’t recognize, my brain completely freezes and I lose the bigger picture as I try to scramble and figure out one small piece. I get the urge to look it up and check the moment I hit an unrecognized word. A habit I’m trying to steer away from. But in Chinese/English, if I ever come across words I don’t know I can kind of guess the meaning based on context without skipping a beat. It’s not necessarily about memorizing words, because you’ll memorize the words you use more often and the rest is kind of rattling somewhere in the back of your mind, it’s more like comfort and confidence that you guess correct based on the information present (root words, context, etc.), and the words you have already memorized. The best example I have is when watching shows or playing games. Whenever there’s a made up word in whatever fantasy world, in English and Chinese, I just take it as it is and my brain figures it out automatically and puts the puzzle together. Things are called what they’re called and I just accept it, because as I see/hear the words my brain just figures it out. I have enough comfort and exposure in those languages to “just make it work”. In Japanese however, all that processing goes out the window. Since I’m learning that language, I feel the need to take the time to understand and define everything which leads to a complete halt in “passive understanding”. Kind of like when you eavesdrop by accident because you don’t need to try to understand, it just happens when you hear it. But in foreign languages you have to actively listen and kind of translate in your head. Someone brought up a similar example, but like “-phobia” meaning fear. You might not know what the fear is about but you know it’s afraid of something maybe? But a hydrophobic material doesn’t mean “afraid of water” literally, but you can make the leap to the correct definition. All that guessing and connecting of dots happens automatically with your comfortable language(s). Some words might be a loan word from a different language, but I think English follows a pattern enough to where you can still kind of guess depending on other loan words.. and if you’re wrong, you’re wrong.. it is what it is, which is usually the same in Chinese for me.

Is the OP's question really ”How do you remember how to read/write so many English words”? That seems to be the question most people are answering. My answer would be that as well as learning a lot of them from reading, for reading I can often guess by sounding out the letters, or just looking the word up if that doesn't help. For writing, if I don't know how to spell it, a dictionary or google will usually help if I can't remember if it has a double L or a Z instead of S, etc. I have no idea how many words I know. Do any of you?

We make up words for things we don’t know the word for. Also every word has like 10 synonyms that we can pick and choose from

Just like in your example, English words are made up of morphemes. You can sometimes figure out the meaning by looking at familiar parts of the word and knowing what they mean. For remembering them, native speakers have just used them so much that we can just remember a lot of words because of how much we use and hear them.

You just do.

Because they are based on the 26 letter mostly phonetic alphabet. Despite some really atrocious exceptions, most words can be sounded out. Faced with a new word in writing, ninety-nine percent of the time I can say it, even if I don't know what it means. If it's multisyllabic I have a fair chance of guessing the meaning too. Spelling harder, but I'm not great at spelling. But I do just fine in Spanish, because it really is phonetic.

This is fundamentally a difference between logographic languages like chinese, where the meaning of the written word is encoded in a symbol, and phonographic languages like English and other european languages, where the word encodes the sound, snd the sound encodes the meaning.  Just like you can guess a written word based based on what It looks like, we can intuit (some) words based on what they sound like. This is particularly useful as English uses a lot of loanwords from Latin and greek, and Germanic languages (and their descendants), and you can sound out what they probably mean by comparing them to other sounds.

It is helpful to learn root words or vocabulary through association. For example, if you understand that mal comes from the Latin for bad/evil, then it helps unlock most words that have that same root (malefactors, malice, malicious, malevolent, malcontent, maleficent, malformed, malnourished, etc.)

There are two separate things here … learning the words (spoken), and learning the written representations of the words.  We probably learn the words in a similar way for spoken language.  When it comes to learning the written representations of those words, there’s only 26 characters to learn, since it’s an alphabetic writing system. Then they get arranged relatively phonetically, so children can learn to sound out what they think a word is, and learn the exceptions (how the spelling doesn’t really represent the sound well anymore or in their dialect). 

If you get good at English you start noticing the root-words that are a part of bigger words, and you can make guesses based on those. Our version of the "radical" characters are those root words. Sometimes the spelling has changed or warped quite a bit, though. Arboretum: - Arbor used to be a French/Latin word for tree, and is still in the name of the environmental holiday "Arbor Day", but now is mostly a technical term for a "component that supports things". - -etum (and many -um endings) is a Latin ending that makes something a place - an Arboretum is a formal garden of many kinds of trees, used for decoration, education, or research This is more useful long words, though, at least for most people.  "Forest" was something like "fir hurst", that is a "hurst" (thicket/Grove, not used anymore) of fir trees. This was 1000 years ago, though. Most people don't know that history, and "hurst" is from a different language. European languages have lots of those endings like -etum, -tion/sion, -ly, -ity, -ite, -ette, etc. They can't be used as words by themselves, but you can add multiple to a word to make its meaning more specific. English is hard because it's very different from Chinese, structurally. If you can understand spoken English pretty well, and you like history, the History of the English Language Podcast. Every episode talks about a period of history, what words/grammar appeared then, and how pronunciation changed. It starts in prehistory with the language that most European/Persian/North Indian languages are related to in some way, and goes through Latin and Greek and German root words until it gets to English. Did that help?

If you know Latin, French, Greek and German you can often work out the meaning of a new word from its origins. (I know that doesn't help if you are Chinese!) For example, if you know "lithograph" comes from stone + writing in Greek, you may guess that lithosphere means the solid outer part of the earth (the rocky crust and upper mantle) or that lithotripsy (stone + smashing) in medicine means smashing kidney stones (using ultrasonic waves). In other words, there are patterns to look for. You can recognize a lot of prefixes and suffixes that way: geo- means "earth", -ology means "study of", -phobia means "fear of", -itis means "inflammation of" and so on.

The best way to learn english words is to learn the alphabet, that’s what we’re taught when we’re little. We learn what sound each letter makes, then we’re taught special rules with combined letters like “oo” and “th” and even rules with “bossy ‘e’” - which makes the letter a strong sound if the e is after the vowel and a consonant for examples : ate = a t e , the e makes the a make an AY sound not an AH sound. My advice is learning sounds and then you learn how to piece the word together.

Step by step, reading a lot could help. At the beginning read book looks like a slow activity, but along the time the skill will improve.

Practice, patience, and mnemonics. Some words I can never remember if it's "-ance" or "-ence", or if it's one L or two.

A lot of words have etymological relationships with others and you don’t necessarily have to know all the words in the English language to be able to figure out with a combination of context and word components (suffixes, prefixes, roots, much like the many symbols in your characters) what a word means. For a simple example, maybe I don’t know the word “revisit” but I know the word “visit”… I can deduce that the re- means “visit, again”, in this case even without context.

you only need to learn 26 letters? come on...

Just met a word in my feed which includes r/residency since I'm fascinated by medicine, I meet lots of words I don't know: Heterotopic Ossificans (prophylaxis). My work-it-out guess: Hetero=different. topic=place/space. Ossificans. = bone (prophylaxis is preventing/clearing) AI says: preventing the abnormal formation of bone in soft tissues, typically after surgical procedures or trauma. So, knowing the Latin/Greek made my guess spot on.

It's just how your brain gets wired up throughout childhood. It's all intuition, I couldn't even explain a single English rule to you because I don't know them directly.

Huh I just learned something today about how different languages can truly be. I never considered your perspective, as a native speaker to me it’s similarly difficult for me to understand how it’s possible to remember so many symbols.

In English, since I know the alphabet, I can figure out the pronunciation of words I've never seen before. Words contain root words, prefixes, and suffixes that can indicate the meaning. For example, view, preview, viewfinder, or interviewer. It is similar to how radicals in Chinese have phonosematic roles.

In English, we learn to use phonics to decode words to how they sound. Then we only have to “memorise” the exceptions to the rules.

You say it makes sense but is that true? All my Asian language teachers said you needed a college level education basically to read newspapers in Asia due to how many Kanji there are in Japanese and Japan. Meanwhile almost everyone in America can read a news article by 9th grade.

We can sometimes do something like that with word roots. A reasonable number of our words are built from Latin or Greek root words put together; if you know those roots, you can sometimes make a good guess. Take "herbicide," for instance. "-cide" means "kill." And an "herb" is an edible plant used for flavoring. An "herbicide" is a substance that kills plants. As it happens, the "edible" and "flavoring" ideas aren't part of it; it means any plant. So the guess will sometimes only be close, rather than completely right. But it is still close.

That’s a great question. The reason English words feel harder to recognize for you is probably because English is a phonetic language, where words are built from letters that mainly represent sounds. In contrast, Chinese is a logographic system, where each character carries meaning, and you can often guess the meaning or pronunciation from its components, like radicals. So even if you haven’t seen a Chinese character before, you might still have clues. But in English, unless you already know the word, the spelling often doesn’t give you much help. It’s really just two different systems: one focuses on sound, the other on meaning. That’s why we often say “English is a language, Chinese is a script”. One is spoken-based, the other meaning-based. Btw, I’m also Chinese

I recommend studying "prefixes and suffixes" and then doing exercises from Cambridge Use of English part 3.

I’m not sure whether this is a serious question or a parody of posts asking the same thing going the other way. Either way, the answer is: practice. Read a lot in your chosen language. Look up words you don’t know. Same as developing large vocabulary in your native language, really.

Brute force memorization? Some “fancy words” are Latinate and you’ll start to recognize Latin root words and guess what it might mean. But the nuance would need to be looked up in the dictionary.

I concur with what others have said. Furthermore, English _tries_ to be phonetic, as it uses the latin alphabet system. This means we can, with the understanding of some complex rules, sound out a word based solely on its spelling and derive from it similar words or the word's root meaning. So, there is a logic to it, even if English likes to break its own rules often.

First, make sure to learn a solid number of common words - without basic vocabulary, the rest won’t be very practical. Once you have that foundation, focus on real usage. As someone who speaks English as a third language and is still learning, my advice is to read more books—any books you enjoy, not necessarily educational ones. Also, watch more videos in English. Don’t try to translate every single word, instead, learn to understand the meaning from context. It might be difficult at first, but with time, you’ll improve.

You start of very basic then you learn about synonyms very gradually. They're words which means the same or similar things but you can interchange in order to use the right English for the context For certain words you don't understand you can think about similar words. So if you don't know what the word flammable means. It's got the word flame hidden in it. So flammable must mean flame - able. There is the ability for flames to occur English is a mix of mostly three different langauges so it's tricky but you get the hang of it eventually

Our words look different but for the most part we can figure out how to say any word we see using phonics

Mmm well, aside from just memorizing words, we also can derive words. So if you know what beautiful means, you probably will understand what beauty means as well. And even if Chinese characters can show the meaning of words more, words are still are kinda arbitrary at a glace. 電池, electric-lake? 矛盾 spear-shield? Vocabulary is what I’d say takes the most amount of time (it can basically go on forever really), especially when it’s a language from a cultural sphere completely different from your own, so you just gotta memorize them and read a ton.

I am a Chinese and my vocabulary test says that I know about 16000 words. My technique is to prioritize the pronunciation first. Back in the day most people are illiterate, but they can speak their native language perfectly fine, this to me is a indication that the sound of a word is a much more essential part than its spelling or shapes. So whenever I come across a new word, I will try to get familiar with its sound first. This not only improve my listening but also make it easier to memorize the word.

prefixes, suffixes, and context can help alot.

You can deduce the meaning of many English words from their etymology too. For example, I can tell what the word "bibliophile" means (book lover), from its roots: biblio- relating to a book, and -phile meaning someone who likes something. You start to make these connections as you practice more. I assume Chinese works the same way, you just find it easier because it's your mother tongue.

We meet them in context, as we read.

From repetition and constantly speaking, it’s always easy to memorize words when you’ve grown up speaking your native language your whole life

That's just how language works. The human brain is good at remembering/learning words. Bear in mind that not everyone in China is literate (able to read), especially historically people were not literate (in any country) and illiterate people can communicate just fine and remember a large vocabulary of words. While the alphabet may not give visual clues to the meaning of a word, many words are related to other words and their meaning can be identified from a combination of context and similarities with known words.

English spelling reflects pronunciation (kind of, sometimes). So if we see an unfamiliar word we can "sound it out" and see if it sounds like some word we already know, but just haven't seen written down. For words we don't know, we can sometimes figure them out from their parts. Just like Chinese characters have radicals, many English words are put together from roots and affixes that have a set meaning. So if I see a word like "megalopolis," and I know "megalo-" means "big" and "polis" means "city," I can guess it means something like "really big city." If I see another word, like "megalomaniac," and I know "maniac" means "insane person," then I can know that this is some kind of insanity that has to do with bigness. If I see it in context, that's usually enough to get me to the meaning: "he thinks so highly of himself, he's a megalomaniac." But sometimes, we see a word and have no idea what it means, or even for sure how to pronounce it. And that's when we have to just look it up.

Unfamiliar words can sometimes be broken out into their root parts. Let's take "Subterranean" "Sub-" is a common beginning for a word (also called a prefix) and in this case it means "under". Submarine = under water. Subtext = (words metaphorically) under the text "Terra" is the same as earth, ground -ean (or -ian) is a common ending for a word, also called a "suffix". In this case the suffix means "part of" or "many from". As in European (person from Europe) So "subterranean" literally means "under earth parts" but in a sentence it might be used to describe drain pipes under your house "the City built subterranean pipes for the sewage water"

Chinese characters make sense because of the radicals, but English words? They’re all over the place! Like, why is "through" spelled like that but sounds totally different from "tough" or "though"? English spelling is wild. What helped me was learning word roots and prefixes/suffixes from Latin or Greek. Like "bio" means life, so "biology," "biography," etc., all relate to life. Not perfect, but it’s something! Also, flashcards (Anki is great) and just seeing words over and over in context books, shows, etc.

How can you remember so many thousands of characters in Chinese? Same way we remember English words. There are many parts of words that appear in words with similar meanings.

In English we have 26 letters and a few variation on the pronunciation, but overall you can even guess how to pronounce words since we only have a handful of letters. You only need to remember a few dozen letters and sounds in English.