One of the most challenging processes that language learners must go through is vocabulary acquisition. EFL learners need to understand the effective vocabulary learning strategies in order to overcome their challenges in learning vocabulary. The current study investigated the EFL learners’ beliefs regarding their vocabulary learning strategies (VLSs) at Badakhshan University, Afghanistan. The study's main goal was to determine which of the learners' strategies were utilized the most and which were used the least. Furthermore, the study investigated the EFL students' common vocabulary challenges as well as EFL teachers' views on the efficacy of vocabulary acquisition strategies in acquiring English vocabulary. This study utilizes a mixed method research design with 71 EFL learners who participated in the survey questionnaire adopted from Schmitt (1997) taxonomy of VLSs which consists of five categories namely determination strategies, social strategies, memory strategies, cognitive strategies and metacognitive strategies, and a semi-structured interview that was carried out with 8 EFL teachers. The descriptive analysis in SPSS version (26) revealed that EFL learners used metacognitive strategies as the highly used VLS through which they learned new words from movies, the internet and word tests. Whereas, social strategies were the least used strategies among EFL learners. Moreover, the most frequent challenges EFL learners encountered in learning English vocabulary were the problems of applying words in real and proper context, challenges related to spelling and the problems of pronunciation. The thematic analysis of EFL teachers’ interviews showed that they were aware of VLSs, such as studying English vocabulary through context as well as speaking with native speakers. In addition, the responses in the interviews revealed that EFL teachers were unable to teach some VLSs that were useful to their students because of the students’ poor command of grammar and their ow