How to better memorize new words
Have you ever felt irritated because you are unable to remember a word in another language? You have already studied and repeated it hundreds of time, but for some reasons you can’t really remember that word.
No need to panic, after 2 or 3 years of language learning we all have the impression that we are not progressing anymore and that learning new words became more and more difficult.
However you should never think that your brain doesn’t have any more space to learn new vocabularies, you probably just need to adjust a little bit your way of learning.
Here you have some suggestions to better memorize new words:
- Write on a notebook a list of words to revise and make sure to bring it always with you, so that if you meet a new word you can always write it down.
- Revise those words every 30 minutes, 5 hours, 2 days or once a week in order to fix them faster in your long-term memory.
- Organize your vocabulary around a particular subject (Work, Traveling…) and learn them with their antonyms (хорошо-плохо)
- Select only the most used words and base the order of the list on their frequency
- Decompose the words in different parts. For example the word Подушка it’s
composed of “под“(under) and “уши” (ears) and it refers to the object that we put under our ears when we go to sleep. - Memorize the words into small phrases. Write always examples near the words in your list.
- Make small cards with words written in your mother tongue on one side and on the other side write their translation. If you have 5 free minutes on the bus, take some of them, look at one word in your language, then try to remember its translation.
- Put into practices what you have learned: read a lot, listen to songs or podcasts, watch a movie or a TV series.
Learning new words it’s not only interesting, but it’s also very useful to keep your brain active!
Matilde Miliazza, currently studying Russian at Liden & Denz.
