How to memorize foreign words easily and effectively

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Language expert Luca Lampariello reveals five key methods to help him expand his vocabulary.

They say that languages are better for children than for adults. Hundreds of educational resources promise to help you learn just as easily: naturally, with the least amount of conscious effort. It's tempting. But is it really worth learning the way children do?

Adults should not be underestimated. To fully master the language (albeit without specific vocabulary), a child needs about six years. But a mature person, capable of using both subconscious resources and a conscious approach to learning, can reach an advanced level in just a year.

It probably sounds bold. But I am living proof of this, because I have mastered 11 languages to varying degrees - from intermediate to advanced. I learned most of them as an adult.

The secret of my success lies in the combination of child and adult approaches to learning languages. We can take the best from each of them by adhering to the following principles.

1. Selection

When working with new vocabulary, it is important to understand how to select the words that are most interesting and necessary for you. There are hundreds of thousands of words in every language, and the vast majority of them are not useful at the start. The ability to filter out language noise is one of the most overlooked skills of the experienced learner.

Topics in most textbooks range from shopping and airplane travel to the zoo, and people are reluctant to learn these words by telling themselves that they should. You can just as well read the entire newspaper when you only need to find out about sports news.

Don't make this mistake. Learn the most useful words in the language and move forward according to your needs and interests.

The commonly used 3,000 words make up 90% of a native speaker's daily vocabulary.

Of course, a native speaker knows thousands of words related to a huge number of topics. But most of the vocabulary people acquire in the process of communication. In childhood, they only care about interesting words that are necessary for daily communication. The rest of the vocabulary comes with age, when the depth and specificity of interests change.

Focus on words that are really useful. They form the foundation of what I call core vocabulary. This includes vocabulary related to everyday life, such as the verbs “walk”, “walk”, “sleep”, “want” and nouns “name”, “house”, “car”, “city”, “hand”, “bed.

Once you have mastered the 3,000 most common words, the rest will be more difficult. At this stage, the speed of language learning may drop. Progress seems to be slowing down and it’s not clear why.

The reason is as follows. The larger your vocabulary, the harder it is to find new useful words, let alone memorize them. At this stage, it is important to focus on topics of personal life, work and your interests. This vocabulary constitutes a personal vocabulary.

A biologist, for example, should learn words like "gene", "cell", "synapse", "skeleton", and a lover of history - "war", "monarchy", "society", "trade".

Interest is an important ally in the fight against forgetfulness. If you focus on words that are meaningful to you, you will increase your chances of remembering what you have learned for a long time. It is a logical, consistent, and engaging approach to vocabulary expansion.

2. Search for associations

Selecting useful words is the key to successful learning. But if you memorize these words out of context, then it will be difficult for you to put them together in order to actively use the language. Associations can help shape this context.

Finding associations is a process by which new information is linked to existing knowledge.

One piece of information can have thousands of associations with memories, emotions, experiences, and individual facts. This process naturally occurs in the brain, but we can take it under conscious control.

To do this, let's go back to the aforementioned words: “gene”, “cell”, “synapse”, “skeleton” … If we memorize them separately, we will soon forget everything. But if we learn these words in the context of a sentence, it will be much easier for us to put them together in our mind. Think about this for 10 seconds and try to connect these four words.

You may end up with something similar: "Genes influence the development of such different elements as the skeleton, brain synapses and even individual cells." All four words are now united by a common context - like pieces in a puzzle.

Approach these exercises progressively. First, try to combine groups of words that share a specific topic like physics or politics. Then try to build more complex associations between unrelated words. You will get better with practice.

3. Repetition

More than a hundred years ago, the German physicist Ebbinghaus came to the conclusion that we forget information according to a certain scheme, which he called "". We perfectly remember everything that we have recently learned. But the same information disappears from memory in a matter of days.

Ebbinghaus discovered a mechanism to combat this phenomenon.

If new information is repeated at precise intervals, it will become more difficult to forget it. After a few spaced repetitions, it will become entrenched in long-term memory and, most likely, will remain in the head forever.

You need to regularly repeat the old information while working with the new one.

4. Recording

The ancient Romans said: "The words fly away, the written remains." That is, in order to remember information, you need to fix it in a permanent format. When you learn new words, write them down or type them on the keyboard to save and come back to them later.

When faced with a new useful word or phrase during a conversation, watching a movie or reading a book, enter it into your smartphone or laptop. Thus, you can repeat what you have recorded whenever you need it.

5. Application

Use what you learn in meaningful conversations. This is the essence of the last of the basic methods for effective word learning.

University of Montreal researchers Victor Boucher and Alexis Lafleur discovered Honor Whiteman. … that using words in conversation is more effective in terms of memorization than saying them out loud to yourself.

In other words, the more you communicate with other people, the better your linguistic memory works and the faster the level of language proficiency grows. Therefore, always use the material you have learned in real conversations. This method will greatly improve your skills and provide experience in using new and long-learned words.

Let's say you've read an article on a topic that interests you. You can choose unfamiliar words from it and apply them later in a short conversation with your language partner. You can mark and learn keywords, and then retell the content of the article with their help. See how well you learn the material after the conversation.