ACTIVE VS PASSIVE VOCABULARY

The active vocabulary is the largest of all the vocabulary we own in a language. This type of vocabulary is made up of the words and phrases we use on a daily basis and takes up a good 80 percent of our language memory. What about the other 20 percent of our storage memory? It is taken up by passive vocabulary, the words we recognize and know when we hear or read them but do not often use, if ever. We tend to forget them until we are confronted by them. It is as if we had two bags with words: in one pack we have the run-of-the-mill ones we are constantly employing and in the other the obscure, high-brow terms, mots, we do know and recognize only when we stand face to face with them, but will never use. Now, the challenge is to pass the passive words to the active pack, somehow. How? I figure that some words are reluctant to be owned, for whatever reason, and we must try harder to harness them and place them into active service so that we can express ourselves better and with more accuracy. My method is to use them often in my daily intercourse (in the good sense of the word) and to copy them longhand in my notebooks. It is hard work because they are a wild bunch and takes time to tame them.