How to Memorize Vocabulary Easily, Quickly & Effectively

These memorization techniques can remarkably improve your ability to remember words, making learning vocabulary much easier.

As an ESL learner, you have to learn lots of new words, or vocabulary as teachers call it. These are Scots’ suggestions on how to maximum your effectiveness, minimize your time and make English word learning easier.

1. You can improve your ability to remember words by connecting to what you already know. Our minds carry a large amount of information. By relating new information to familiar material, you can remember new information better.

2. After learning something new, it’s better to review within the first 15 minutes. According to studies, students have much greater retention of learned information if they review briefly right after.

3. Read the words, phrases and sentences out loud, rather than silently in your head. This way, you can get the feel for the vocabulary on your tongue and find them more familiar in later uses. And what better way to do this than to communicate with your friends, classmates and teachers? We encourage ‘English Only on Campus’ that reinforces English learning in a safe and proactive manner so that students can learn to speak English and think in English.

4. Aside from reading words out loud, writing them down is another great tool. Writing allows you to use motor memory (hand-eye memory) for recall; otherwise, you can quickly forget the words. Also, rather than writing one word many times before moving on to the next one, write each word once or twice and then go through the whole list again. Continue until you have got the required number of repetitions. This way will help you memorise words and make them stick in your long-term memory.

5. Narrow reading/ narrow listening is also an effective way for students to improve English vocabulary by enabling them to see new vocabulary repeatedly in various contexts. For example, choose a topic, and then listen to a podcast on that topic, watch English lessons about it, watch a film on it, watch a documentary, read in a book about it, read about it on Wikipedia. By so doing, you are getting the repetition of the words, phrases and also the sentence structure in different ways, in natural ways and in ways that are going to help you use the vocabulary flexibly and it’s going to stay firmly in your memory, too.

6. Another effective way is using vocabulary flashcards. Nischi automatically tracks unfamiliar words you encounter while studying. This ensures that you don't miss any unfamiliar words.

7. You can use cognates to help lend additional context to new words. Cognates are two words in different languages that share the same meaning, spelling and pronunciation. Cognate words are rarely exactly equivalent to the original word, but the relationship and similarities will help picture it in your mind. This technique is especially helpful for languages that share many similar words — for example, English and Spanish.

8. Telling a tall story is an effective memory trick. Just make a crazy story using the words you are trying to remember. We indeed remember stories easily, especially crazy stories. Repeat the story and you will remember the words.

9. Another way to learn English vocabulary is learning words with opposite meanings (antonyms) and words with similar meanings (synonyms) together. For example, learn happy/ cheerful (synonyms) and happy/ depressed (antonyms) at the same time. We can remember opposite and similar things more easily as they come up together in our mind.

You can accomplish this using Nischi's mindmap.