How to memorize vocabulary, and actually keep it

How many words do you need?

Vocabulary researchers count word families: a base word with its inflected and derived forms, such as help, helps, helped, helpful and unhelpful. The question they ask is how much of a text you need to know to understand it without help.

In a well-known 2006 study, Paul Nation estimated that knowing 98% of the words in a text, one unknown word in fifty, needs a vocabulary of about 8,000 to 9,000 word families for written English and 6,000 to 7,000 for spoken English. Later work suggests that following everyday conversation with a little effort needs fewer. Either way, the first few thousand families do most of the work, and they're where to start.

The figures are for English; other languages differ in detail, but the principle is the same. At ten new words a day, a year of steady study gives you over 3,500: past the stage where conversations are a struggle.

Learn the right words first

• Start with a frequency list for your language, or a course book that's built on one. The most frequent words come up so often that each one pays back many times.
• Then add the words of your own life and studies: your course's textbook chapters, your field, your interests.
• Learn words you've met in context, from something you read or heard, rather than random entries from a dictionary. You'll remember where they came from.
• Be wary of themed lists of very similar words (all the fruits, all the colours) at the start. Studies by Thomas Tinkham and Rob Waring in the 1990s found that learning closely related words together causes more mix-ups than learning them apart.

What it means to know a word

Paul Nation describes word knowledge in three parts: form (how it sounds and is written), meaning (what it refers to, and its related words), and use (its grammar, the words it goes with, and when it's appropriate). A flashcard with a word on one side and a translation on the other covers only a slice of that.

• Recognition (receptive knowledge): you see or hear the word and know what it means.
• Recall (productive knowledge): you want to say something and the word comes to you.
• Collocations: the words it naturally goes with, like make a decision but do homework.
• Grammar that travels with it: a noun's gender and plural, a verb's irregular forms or the case it takes.

Recognition comes first and is easier. Recall is what you need to speak and write, and it takes separate practice.

Make vocabulary flashcards that work

• One word, or one meaning of a word, per card. A word with three meanings deserves three cards, each with its own example.
• Add an example sentence, ideally the one where you met the word.
• Add audio, or at least the pronunciation, from the start. Fixing a wrong pronunciation later is harder than learning it right.
• Use a picture instead of a translation for concrete nouns where you can: it links the word to the thing, not to your own language.
• Include the article or gender with every noun in languages that have them: learn die Entscheidung, not Entscheidung.
• Write a sentence of your own with the word. Producing something yourself helps you remember it, a finding called the generation effect.

More on card design in how to make flashcards that work.

Recognition first, then recall

A sensible order: add a new word as a recognition card. Once you know it reliably, add a recall card, or the cloze version, for the words you'll want to use yourself. Not every word needs both: many words you only need to understand, and adding recall cards for all of them doubles your reviews.

Spaced repetition: how many words a day?

Vocabulary is where spaced repetition shines: thousands of small, separate items you need to keep for years. A scheduler brings each word back just before you'd forget it, so well-known words need only a handful of reviews a year. See the forgetting curve for why.

In our simulation of a year of FSRS reviews, each new card cost about ten reviews in its first year at a 90% recall target. That gives a practical guide:

Ten new words a day is a strong, sustainable pace for most learners alongside other study. Twenty is possible if vocabulary is your main focus. Short daily sessions beat long weekly ones: the schedule depends on reviewing on the day words are due.

Mnemonics for stubborn words

The keyword method links a foreign word to a similar-sounding word in your own language and a vivid image connecting the two. In the 1970s, Richard Atkinson and Michael Raugh showed it helped students learn Russian vocabulary. The research since suggests the benefit can fade, and making good images takes time. Use it for the few words that keep slipping, not as your main method. More memory techniques in how to memorize things fast.

Context: reading and listening

Flashcards give you a large base quickly. Reading and listening show you how words behave: their collocations, register and grammar. They also give you the repeated encounters that turn recognised words into ones you understand instantly.

• Read material where you know most of the words: graded readers at first, then texts on topics you know.
• Listen every day, even briefly: podcasts, series with subtitles in the language, lectures in your field.
• When a word you've learned turns up in the wild, notice it. When a new useful word turns up, make a card from the sentence it came in.

New scripts, tones and genders

A new script

Learn the alphabet or syllabary before vocabulary: Cyrillic, Greek or the Japanese kana take days to weeks, and everything after is faster. For Chinese characters and Japanese kanji, learn the common components, which recur in many characters.

Tones and pitch

In tonal languages such as Mandarin, the tone is part of the word. Learn every word with audio, and include the tone in the answer.

Grammatical gender

Learn nouns with their article (der Tisch, la table, il tavolo) from the first day. Some learners colour-code genders on their cards, which helps a visual memory.

A daily routine

1. Reviews first: 10 to 20 minutes of due cards.
2. New words: 10 to 20, from your course, your reading or a frequency list.
3. Context: 10 minutes of reading or listening.
4. Output: say or write three sentences using recent words.

Vocabulary for your language course

If you're studying a language at university, your syllabus decides which words are examined: the textbook's chapter lists, the readings, the lecture slides. Make your cards from those. FlashCardz turns your own course PDFs and slides into cards, in the language of your material, with each card linked to the page it came from, and schedules them with FSRS. It works in 28 languages, imports Anki decks, and its card maker is free for cards you write yourself. See flashcards for language learning.