Know your word forms: Maximizing your vocabulary!

As an English learner, you must be facing the necessity to learn new vocabulary. How do you do it? Most likely, simply by memorizing, maybe you took a step further and found out how to use associations to facilitate the process; you also might be using one of the numerous vocabulary apps. However, not everybody is aware of a method that can help you increase the number of words you know without any extra efforts, and the way to do it is through the usage of suffixes and prefixes.
In very simple terms, a suffix is a letter or group of letters at the end of the word, while a prefix is a letter or a group of letters at the beginning of the word. Their purpose is to make a new word; for example, in the word changing, the final -ing is a suffixe which is added to the word change. 
In one of the previous articles I already talked about the typical suffixes of different parts of speech, and here I'd like to tell you how you can use this information to improve your vocabulary.

1. Changing part of speech by changing suffix.Basically, if you know certain correspondences between word suffixes, a great power is in your hands. Let's take a look at the table below. 

In this table you can see the common relations between word suffixes. For instance, in a typical situation the adjective ending in -nt is likely to have a respective noun ending in -nce or -ncy, e.g. important - importance, fluent - fluency. How can you use this information? Well, it would be great if learning a new word, you'd think what word forms it could possibly have. Say, if you're learning the word create, you could check this table to see what other parts of speech can be derived from this word, in which case you'd see that it might be creative for the adjective and creation for the noun. Following that, you'd need to look them up in a dictionary to see if these words actually exist, and if so, you know two more words without doing any extra work.

2. -ed vs. -ing adjectives
This is something that many non-native English speakers get wrong, so let's once again try to clear it up.
Actually, everything is fairly simple, if you want to say how somebody feels, you use -ed (bored students), and if you want to describe something or someone, to say what it/he/she is like, you should use -ing (an interesting book). You can also use this knowledge to your advantage, for example, if you know the word frightened, as in a frightened boy, it's easy to understand that an event that frightens you is frightening.

3. -ful vs. -less
This one's even easier, the suffix -ful means that something or someone is full of a particular quality, e.g. hopeful means full of hope; in its turn, -less means that something or someone lacks a certain quality, e.g. hopeless means having no hope (mind you, it has other meanings as well). Knowing this, in many cases you can easily switch between the opposites.

4. Weather words

Did you know that if you add –y at the end of some common nouns referring to weather/nature, you will get a respective adjective? If not, feel free to have a look at the table below.

5. A few more words about the opposing adjectives.
You might already be aware that many adjectives with the opposite meaning can be formed with the use of un-, in-, im-, il-, ir-, and dis- at the beginning (these are prefixes). Unfortunately, there's no hard and fast rule about how to use all these prefixes, and whether you should use one of them or the suffix -less. But, there is a small trick: im- is usually used with adjectives beginning with p, ir- with adjectives that begin with r, and il- with adjectives that begin with l.

Disclaimer
I have to warn you that these techniques do not always work, just like we have regular verbs and nouns that change according to the rules, and there are irregular verbs and nouns, the forms of which we just have to learn. However, if you use this knowledge wisely, you get a chance to broaden the horizons of your English skills, which is a possibility too cool to ignore.