Active and Passive Vocabulary?

harvester · Post by **harvester** » Sat Oct 21, 2006 3:53 pm

Could you explain more about "active and passive vocabulary", please? Thanks a lot!!!

jeffcox · Post by **jeffcox** » Sun Oct 22, 2006 5:18 am

Active vocabulary: words that you can use when you have to produce English. That is, when you speak or when you write.

Passive vocabulary: words that you recognize the meaning of. That is, when you hear or read them. But, you can't use them or don't remember them when you have to speak or write.

We possess more passive vocabulary than active, even in our native language.

qwertyu · Post by **qwertyu** » Sat Oct 28, 2006 11:31 am

Thanks, It is very useful. Btw I think that, Before became active vocabulary, words must be passive vocabulary.

harvester · Post by **harvester** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 9:26 am

Thanks a lot! Yes, now I see, active vo. is the words we understand and use them frequently, passive vo. is all the words we understand but not very often use them or sometimes we can't remember them. So my active vo. is much smaller than passive vocabularies. :) The more we learn of words day bay day and try to use them, we will collect a lot of passive words and we can change them into active vo.