What is the best way to learn vocabulary so that it actually sticks?
Asked by Stuart
I learn 20 words, and a week later I remember about three of them. What are teachers actually recommending here?
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1 answer
The reason your twenty words become three is almost certainly that you are learning them the wrong way round. **Learn words in sentences, never in isolation.** A word on its own has no hooks. A word in a sentence you find useful, funny, or true has several. "Perro = dog" is inert; "Mi perro odia la lluvia" is a memory. **Test yourself, do not re-read.** Recognising a word on a list feels like learning and is not. Retrieval — trying to produce it and failing — is what builds the memory. This is why flashcards work and highlighting does not. **Space it out.** Review at increasing intervals, not all in one sitting. Anki does this for you; a notebook and a bit of discipline does it nearly as well. **Go after frequency first.** The most common 1,000 words cover the great majority of everyday speech. Learning them properly beats knowing 3,000 obscure ones. **Use them, quickly.** A word you have spoken aloud in a real conversation within a week of meeting it is a word you own. One you have only ever seen is a word you are renting. Expect to meet a word roughly seven times, in different contexts, before it is genuinely yours. Knowing that number in advance stops you concluding that your memory is broken — it is not, it is just normal.
Stuart