A vocabulary list is a small notebook, paper or digital, for collecting new English words as you meet them.
Keep it somewhere visible daily. After reading, add two or three words with meanings and one example. The steps below walk through choosing words to include, and a finished example entry appears in the entry-building section.
Choosing which words to record
Pick words from something you already read or listened to today, so each word comes attached to a real sentence you actually saw.
Choose a small number first, two or three, instead of copying a whole page, since a short list gets reviewed while a long one gets abandoned.
Favor words that keep appearing, like manage or habit, over rare ones you may never meet again, and skip random dictionary pages.
Include useful phrases as single entries, so make a decision is recorded as one item rather than two separate words.
Mark each word as yours by adding a note on where you met it, for example heard in a podcast about travel, which makes review easier later.
Building each entry
Here is a finished entry as it might look in your notebook. Write the word first, then the meaning in your own English words, then the sentence where you met it. Translation is fine for simple words like soup.
Word: manage. Meaning: to succeed in doing something difficult, like control or handle. Source: a podcast about work. Example: She manages a team of six people.
Word: soup. Meaning: a hot liquid food. Translation: 汤. Source: a menu exercise. Example: I ordered tomato soup for lunch.
Notice what both entries share: the meaning is short enough to understand at a glance, and the example sentence is real, one you actually saw or heard.
An invented sentence is fine too, as long as it sounds natural to you.
For phrases, keep the entry whole. Record make a decision as one item meaning to choose, rather than splitting it into make and decision, since the phrase is the useful unit.