While learning a language involves far more than just memorizing the words for things, there’s no escaping the fact that at some point, you will need to assimilate a large amount of vocabulary.
One of the main reasons people fail at learning languages is that, however hard they try, they can’t seem to remember the words. They may persevere for a while, but eventually, they conclude that they simply don’t have what it takes and give up.
However, the reason they fail isn’t that they can’t do it; it’s that they’re not doing it right. You don’t need super-human capacities for retaining vocabulary, you just need to have the right approach.
To help, in this post, I’m going to talk about some steps you can take to improve your ability to remember new words.
Given the right environment, your vocabulary will expand rapidly with little conscious effort. For example, if you move to Spain, live with a Spanish family and speak Spanish every day, you will quickly pick up a large number of new words without trying.
This is not because you are magically absorbing Spanish by breathing the Spanish air and eating Spanish food. It’s because certain specific processes are taking place.
With your Spanish family, you frequently encounter the most important words. And the new words you meet are recycled every day.
Each of these two elements is equally important, and in this environment, both happen naturally.
First, you automatically encounter the words that are most useful to you. You don’t need to choose which words to learn because the words that come up in your daily life are, by definition, the ones you need most.
Second, you hear them and use them every day, helping to fix them in your long-term memory. We don’t usually learn words the first or even second time we see them. It happens, but it’s relatively rare. Instead, we need to meet a word and use it many times before we truly own it, and an immersion environment ensures this occurs.
This is how we learn language – not by brute memorization of random word lists but by being exposed to the words we need most and then internalizing them through use and repetition.
If you are living with your Spanish family and speaking Spanish every day, you don’t need to think about learning vocabulary because everything is in place for it to happen by itself.
However, without this kind of environment, you need to artificially replicate these processes to give your memory a hand. You need to come up with the right strategies to help.
It’s useful if we break down learning vocabulary into two distinct aspects: growing your vocabulary and retaining individual words.
Growing your vocabulary is your long-term goal. It’s the process that takes you from knowing just a few words at the beginning to mastering potentially thousands of words as you become more advanced.
Learning individual words, on the other hand, is about how to remember each vocabulary item.
It’s about the journey every word takes from when you first encounter it to when it becomes firmly ensconced in your long-term memory.
By separating these two aspects of vocabulary learning, we can come up with strategies that maximize your efficiency in both areas. So now let’s look at how to do it.
When you start a new language, your immediate goal is being able to handle basic interactions, and any course will start by teaching you expressions like “hello”, “thank you” and so on.
As you progress, however, you will be exposed to lots of new language, and not all of it will be useful to you. For example, you might be asked to do a roleplay about hiring ski equipment – but you have never been skiing in your life.
Is it useful, then, to spend time memorizing skiing vocabulary, words you never use in your own language?
No, of course not.
We might want to remember every word we see, but in reality, it just isn’t going to happen. We’re not robots and we can’t retain everything, so you need to learn to be selective. You need to decide which words to learn.
The important point is to choose vocabulary that will be useful for you, vocabulary you’re most likely to use. At the same time, you should also avoid spending time learning words you won’t need.
For example, you might decide to learn the names of all the animals, but how often do you talk about zebras or giraffes in your daily life? Instead, focus your efforts on vocabulary related to your interests, your job, things you really talk about.
You also need to know which words to ignore, and a good example comes from the FSI Basic Thai course.
In one of the first lessons, you are given the Thai word for “blackboard”: กระดานดำ gradaandam.
While this might have been an important word in an FSI classroom in 1960, do you really need to know how to say “blackboard” in Thai in your daily life today? If the answer is no, you don’t need to learn it.
One of the biggest mistakes novice language learners make is trying to learn every new word they meet, but this is not useful, it’s not efficient – and it’s not even possible.
Instead, when you come across a new word, ask yourself if you will need it in your daily life. And if you find you don’t need it, let it go.
Part of choosing what to learn also comes from finding the right linguistic input – you need to know where to find new words to learn.
Kids in school are sometimes given wordlists to learn, often organized by category – so in the careers section, for example, they might find the word for “optician” or “interpreter”.
However, these are not words they are likely to need, so learning these lists is not helpful.
Nowadays, we also have access to an abundance of apps – but often, these are nothing more than glorified wordlists. If an app simply provides you with a list of words to learn, many of them won’t be relevant to you, and your efforts will be wasted memorizing them.
Instead, look for sources of words that you will find useful. If you are a diver, read articles about diving. If you are interested in sport, read the sports section of a newspaper.
Whatever your level, the most important words to learn are the ones you will actually use, so don’t waste your time blindly memorizing vocab just because it’s in a list or an app.
You need to meet new words where they have meaningful context for you, so an app that gives you random vocabulary items, even accompanied by example sentences, is not a useful source of vocabulary.
The final part of growing your vocabulary is learning to forget.
We forget things. We all forget things, and there is nothing we can do about it.
And when we learn a language, we forget words – we forget lots of them.
You should understand that this is a natural part of the process, and you need to learn to accept it.
If you aren’t living with that Spanish family in the perfect immersion environment, learning vocabulary requires time and effort, so you need to maximize your efficiency.
This means if you forget a word, it doesn’t matter. Don’t waste your energy trying to retain 100% of the vocabulary you want to keep. Some words will slip away, so let them. You will see them again later, and you will learn them eventually.
And if you don’t meet a word again, you probably didn’t need it anyway.
So far, we’ve looked at strategies for finding useful words and choosing which ones we want to keep. But when you find a word you like, how can you make sure you don’t forget it? Because as anyone who has ever tried to learn a language knows, there’s a big difference between wanting to remember a word and actually doing it.
When you meet a new word, it needs to mean something to you, and you need to find a way of remembering it. A word in any language is just an arbitrary sound until it is given a meaning, so you need to give it some kind of association – you need to get a hook on it.
For some words, this is easy. For example, if you are learning French, hôtel is almost the same as the English word “hotel”, so no problem here.
Another word, cuisine, means “kitchen” in French, but in English, we use “cuisine” to refer to styles of cooking, so it shouldn’t be so difficult to make an association in your mind.
However, sometimes it takes a bit more creativity to get a hook on a word.
Try saying the word out loud. Does it sound like another word you know? Does it conjure up some kind of image?
A perfect example someone once told me is окно, the Russian word for “window” (pronounced “akno”).
They told me the way they remembered this word was to imagine a Scottish person looking out of the window at yet another rainy day while exclaiming, “ach, no!”. National stereotypes aside, this is highly effective – because twenty years later, I still remember it, even if it’s the only Russian word I know.
Words can be slippery, but as you improve, you will become more skilled at getting hold of them.
It doesn’t matter how simple, contrived or silly it is, as long as it allows you to “own” the word.
Here’s one more example. The Indonesian words for “spoon” and “fork” are sendok and garpu. Perhaps you remember both, but you always confuse them – until you notice that sendok begins with an “S”, just like “spoon”. And when you see that, there’s one more word you’ve got a hook on.
Back to our immersion environment, if you’re living in Indonesia, you won’t need to make an effort to remember sendok and garpu because you will say them and hear them every day.
Repetition is a key element of retaining a new word, but if you’re not in that kind of environment, what can you do? This is where a bit of science can help.
A useful concept is what’s known as the “forgetting curve”.
According to this theory, when you learn something for the first time, you tend to forget it very quickly, but the next time you learn it, it sticks for longer.
Then, when you learn it again, it stays even longer, until eventually, when you have learned it enough times, it lodges in your long-term memory – which is just where you want all your new words to end up.
As we’ve seen, it’s unrealistic to expect to remember new words first time. You have to see a new word as many as ten times or more before you remember it.
If you’re in an immersion environment, you don’t need to worry about this because the repetition takes place naturally. Important words will come up many times in many contexts, and they will quickly make a home in your long-term memory.
However, if you aren’t in an immersion environment, you need to find other ways to ensure this recycling and repetition happens.
So we understand the need for repetition, but as it turns out, there’s also a perfect moment for this repetition to occur: just before you forget a word.
According to research, if you review a word too soon, you don’t benefit from the revision – but if you leave it too late, you have already forgotten the word, and you have to learn it again.
There are many ways to do this, but using flashcards is a tried and tested method – and nowadays, flashcard apps exist with built-in algorithms that recreate the kind of spaced repetition necessary.
Flashcards Deluxe, for example, is a simple and inexpensive option. It allows you to create your own decks of cards, and you can also include example sentences, pictures and even audio to give words more context. You have to pay for the full version, but it’s a one-time payment and it doesn’t cost much, making it worth considering.
However, the important thing is to come up with a system that ensures new vocabulary is recycled until new words take root in your long-term memory.
Concepts like the forgetting curve and spaced repetition may be helpful tools, but while they deal with remembering and forgetting individual items, learning a language is about learning to speak. And that can only come about through practice.
You can only truly own a word when you take it out into the real world and try it out to see if it works, and this is the essential final step of its journey.
When you use a word for the first time, you’re taking a risk. Is it the right word? Are you using it in the right context? Are you pronouncing it correctly? Are you making a mistake?
If you need a word in a conversation, you find the word is there for you and you can use it correctly, that word is now yours. You own it.
But if you make a mistake – and many times you will – this is also an important part of the process because through making mistakes, you learn and improve. This is just another way of getting a hook on a word and fixing it in your long-term memory.
Very often, years later, you will find you can still remember the exact time you used a word incorrectly in a sentence. But that was the last time you used it incorrectly, and you know that was the moment you added that word to your ever-expanding stock of vocabulary.
Alternatively, perhaps you can’t recall a word this time. But that will help you remember it next time, and this is also a useful part of the process.
Throughout this post, I have contrasted learning in the “perfect” immersion environment with learning in classes or through self-study.
The techniques I have given you in this post are designed to replicate what happens naturally in an immersion environment, helping you become more efficient at learning vocabulary and speeding up your progress.
However, learning a language involves employing a range of techniques and strategies as well as exposing yourself to the language in as many situations and contexts as possible and taking every opportunity to practice and use the language in your daily life.
Vocabulary, just like grammar, pronunciation or anything else, is something you have to work at, but you need to find the right balance. You shouldn’t spend all your time on vocabulary while neglecting other vital aspects.
However, by using the strategies and techniques I have given you in this post as part of your wider language learning toolkit, you can quickly improve your ability to retain vocabulary as you strive to master your chosen language.