How to learn

How to learn vocabulary

The main problem with memorising words is not that they are hard to remember but that people learn the wrong words in the wrong form. A list of a hundred random nouns fades within a week, while twenty frequent verbs in real phrases stay. Here is what to change.

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Frequent words first, the rest later#

Words in a language are spread very unevenly: a small core of the most common ones covers most of ordinary text and conversation, and every next thousand adds less and less. The practical conclusion: the first one or two thousand frequent words give far more than the same effort spent on rare ones.

That is why the source of your words matters more than the way you memorise them. Take a frequency list for the language or words from texts you actually need: articles in your field, menus, instructions, subtitles of a series you watch. Words from random themed sets like "animals of the savannah" are forgotten simply because they never come up in your life.

The unit of learning is a phrase, not a word#

A single word with its translation gives you the translation but not the ability to use the word. Learn the short combinations it lives in: not "decision" but "make a decision"; not a bare verb from the dictionary but the verb with the preposition that sticks to it. In practice that means a card that says not "depender — to depend" but "depende del tiempo — it depends on the weather". Prepositions and cases, which otherwise have to be learned separately and painfully, come along for free.

Flashcards done right#

  • One card, one meaning. A word with five translations becomes five cards, otherwise you will never answer "correctly".
  • Both directions. Recognition (foreign → native) and production (native → foreign) are different skills. The second is harder and more useful for speaking.
  • An example on the back. The sentence you met the word in, not an invented one.
  • Sound. For languages whose spelling does not show pronunciation — English, French, Chinese — without audio you will learn the spelling and fail to recognise the word by ear.

Review cards on a schedule with growing gaps, not whenever you remember; how it works is described in spaced repetition.

What to do with stubborn words#

In any hundred there will be a dozen words that will not stick. Treat them separately. Sound plus a picture: invent an absurd scene linking how the word sounds with what it means; the more concrete and ridiculous, the better it holds. It costs time, so use it on single words, not the whole list. Relatives: many words share a root with words you know, including loanwords in your own language, and a link you found yourself is remembered by itself. Your own sentence: write a sentence about yourself, your job or yesterday using the word — personal material sticks much better than neutral. If a word fails three times in a row, put it aside for a month. Sometimes you just do not need it yet.

How many a day without drowning#

A reasonable target for self-study is ten to twenty new words a day, provided you clear your accumulated reviews every day. The danger lies in the reviews: thirty new words daily for a month create a review queue that eats the whole session, and after six weeks people quit. Fewer and without breaks is better. Ten words a day is about three and a half thousand a year — more than most goals need.

From passive to active vocabulary#

Words you recognise when reading do not appear in your speech on their own. You need a separate step — use:

  • retell a paragraph you read in your own words, deliberately inserting five new words;
  • keep a short diary in the language, three or four sentences a day;
  • in conversation, consciously use what you learned this week.

A word is yours when it comes to mind by itself as you try to express a thought, not when you recognise it in a text. A related check is to explain a word's meaning in the language itself without translating — close to how the Feynman technique works.

Common mistakes#

Learning a list in alphabetical order. Learning synonyms and antonyms on the same day — they get mixed up. Learning a noun without its gender, article or plural when those are unpredictable in the language. And the most common one — rereading the list instead of covering the translation and recalling it.

Step-by-step plan

  1. A source of wordsA frequency list of the first thousand words or words from texts you need.
  2. Cards with phrasesOne meaning, both directions, a real example, audio for languages with opaque spelling.
  3. A daily amount and reviews10–20 new words a day plus clearing the review queue every day.
  4. Separate work on stubborn wordsSound and picture, related words, your own sentence; three failures — put it aside for a month.
  5. Every week — use themA retelling, a three-sentence diary, deliberate use in conversation.

Start learning this in your own space

The plan goes into your repository: tick off stages, keep notes — the change history shows how far you have come.

Start the plan

Sources

  • AnkiFree flashcards with spaced repetition, audio and images
    free
  • TatoebaAn open collection of example sentences with translations in dozens of languages
    free

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