How to Learn and Remember Vocabulary

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OK Lucy, quick question. Why did you use pigeons as your main example throughout this whole video? Look, don’t worry about it..it will be fine. If you ask a language teacher; how can I improve my vocabulary? They’ll probably say something similar to: read books watch films speak with natives do vocabulary exercises and repeat, repeat, repeat! These are all valid points! When I was learning Spanish I managed to expand my vocabulary incredibly quickly and this is thanks to a method that I created for myself. This method probably already exists, but I identified my need and I created a solution.

I needed something that I could do bit by bit day by day. And I’m gonna explain to you how you can do this method too. My method is going to help you train your brain to start thinking in that second language so, what’s the first step? Well, when you wake up in the morning you somehow need to remind yourself that today I’m going to be searching for words that I don’t already know. Constantly! So whether you put a poster on your door, a post-it note on your fridge, a reminder on your phone anything to remind you that today’s new words!

So, from the minute you leave the house, you need to be on the look out for words that you don’t know. Try to start thinking in the language that you’re trying to learn, for me it’s Spanish. So, I’m thinking in Spanish. I see a pigeon… ‘paloma’. OK, I know that one… I see a bus stop, I’m not sure how to say that in Spanish. So, I whip out my phone quickly, write it down in English and then I forget about it and I keep on doing that throughout the day. So you’re constantly on the look out.

Do I know that in Spanish? Yes I do. Left it. Do I know that in Spanish? No, I don’t. Write it down. You might end up with five words at the end of the day. You might end up with twenty words at the end of the day. It depends on your level, and also where you are. By doing this you are training your brain to become accustomed to thinking about things in that second language and it will help you towards fluency. Then, you’re also creating a list on your phone of all the things that you’ve seen throughout the day that you don’t know how to say.

Now, the important part of this comes when you arrive home in the evening. So when you get home from work or university that day, you need to dedicate a couple of minutes to creating a word diary. I use a notepad for this, because I like to use use two pages per day. So, I write the date, I write a short sentence about what I did that day. And then I go ahead and I look at the words that I didn’t know today on my phone and I add them into my diary.

So the words I saw today were; pigeon, litter, bus stop, jeweller’s and skyscraper and I don’t know how to say those in Spanish. So I move on to the next page. And I go and search them on the internet. So the first word was pigeon So I get my computer. I use a website like ‘WordReference’. I search ‘pigeon’ and I listen to the pronunciation ‘paloma’. Great,… ‘paloma’ and then I add that to my word diary. One of my words was ‘skyscraper’ that I didn’t know. So I use ‘WordReference’ to search for ‘skyscraper’ and then I listen to the pronunciation ‘rascacielos’. ‘Rascacielos’ ok, and I add that to my word diary ‘rascacielos’, great!

And then I just keep on doing that until my list is full! And then I have a definitive list of all the new vocabulary that I saw today. So ideally you need to do this diary every day. Make it a part of your life and a part of your routine. So what you’re actually doing by following this process and this method is you’re training your brain to be constantly looking and confirming that it knows words in that second language and immediately when it doesn’t know… alert! You write that word down and then you know that you’re going to search for it later.

It’s really interesting to look back through your word diary after months of doing this process, because you see words and you just think ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe I didn’t know how to say that!’. When you wake up the next morning after having completed your diary the night before, you’ll immediately see skyscraper = rascacielos, pigeon = paloma. You just are constantly, it’s there, it’s in your mind. Once you’ve trained your brain to think and process in this way, it’s going to be so much easier to pick up vocabulary and also to identify where your vocabulary is lacking! For many of you, this might not work! Give it a try if it does work. I’d love to hear about your success stories.

Source: English with Lucy Channel on Youtube