There are 4 things that I tend to work on with my clients, four things you can do in order to express yourself really well without learning any new English.

Of those four things, the fourth is “use vivid vocabulary.” A lot of people seem to think that means they need to learn a lot of new words. Learning lots of new words is fun, it’s like a game, I love it (one of my hobbies is learning new words in Chinese, a language I study for fun; I love the writing, it’s a great combination of left brain and right brain).

But learning lots of new words takes a long time, so here’s a little secret: Using vivid vocabulary isn’t about learning lots of new words, it’s about using images to carry the load.

Check out the lyrics to one of my favorite songs, “Pigs On The Wing 1” from Pink Floyd’s Animals album (a great album, by the way, I highly recommend checking it out if you haven’t already)…

The lyrics are:

If you didn’t care what happened to me

And I didn’t care for you

We would zigzag our way through the boredom and pain

Occasionally glancing up through the rain

Wondering which of the buggers to blame

And watching for pigs on the wing

That’s the whole song, just six lines. Pretty simple, right?

But look at how imagery has been packed into those few lines: “zigzag” (giving the image of erratic motion), “rain” (giving the image of dreariness, oppression).

And then there’s the whole “pigs on the wing” thing — what’s a pig on the wing, what does it look like?

There are no fancy words in there at all. But now the listener’s brain is active, which, after all, was the whole point of using vivid vocabulary.

See? You got the benefit, and you didn’t have to learn any fancy new words, which your audience probably wouldn’t know anyway, because they are also not native speakers.

A simple word that kicks off mental activity in other people (watch their faces) is worth 100 times more than a similar word that doesn’t. Find out what those words are, and use them as much as you can.

One great way to do this is to learn songs by heart. Songs have to make a few simple words go a long way. Without even realizing it, you’ll internalize the skill of packing visualness into your speech.