On the tip of my tongue – how to remember vocabulary

Learning English vocabulary remains one of the biggest challenges facing students. If you are studying for a mathematics or chemistry exam, for example, you know the topics that may appear. However, how can you possibly know all the English words that will appear in an exam? You can’t.

What is the Google Translate mistake in this picture?

Moreover, learning isn’t enough. You need to remember the word when you need it. Many times in my years as an English teacher, I use a word in a lesson that I taught my students the day before. A lot of the students realized they had seen the word, but couldn’t remember it. When I explained it to them the day before, they all understood it, but the next day many of them couldn’t remember the meaning.

So which words must you learn before the exam? Or, which words must you learn to be able to freely speak in business meetings or social settings? There is no easy solution to this problem – but I can give you some advice and tactics to help you.

First of all, let me tell you what you mustn’t do: Stay awake the night before an exam, looking at vocabulary lists. Neither should you only try to learn from vocabulary lists if your aim is to improve your vocabulary for your job or social connections.

Vocabulary acquisition is a gradual process. It takes a long time to build your vocabulary to a level that will ensure you success. But how can you know which words to learn? Trying to learn every word that you see is a brave effort, but one that takes up too much time.

One of the first Turkish words that I learned was bademcik iltihabı, which means tonsillitis. The only reason I learned that word was because very soon after arriving in Turkey to work, I fell ill with tonsillitis. I needed to explain to people at work what was wrong with me, and I wanted to tell my new friends and acquaintances when I recovered. So, tip #1 for learning English vocabulary is this: Learn the words that you know will be useful for you.

If a word is useful for you, it means you'll use it often. As a result, the brain thinks, “I should remember it so I can use it again.” This is how the brain sorts the masses of information it encounters during the day. It stores important stuff for immediate future use. On the other hand, it puts data that only might be useful somewhere more difficult to access. The rest it puts in the “recycle bin.” For words that might be useful, if you see them a few more times, the brain may consider putting them in the area for immediate future use – therefore you are more likely to remember them.

But this is a very passive way of learning English vocabulary. So how can you actively learn in order to speed up this process?

Tip # 2 gives advice on this: Keep categorized vocabulary logs. If you are studying English at university and need to write essays, keep a separate vocabulary log for academic words and phrases that can occur in essays (e.g. consequently, nevertheless, effective, etc.). Also, keep a log of words that are connected to your field of study (e.g. engineering, business studies, etc.). You can also put words into categories that relate to your hobbies. If you like to cook, learning the names of foods, cooking processes, and equipment will help you hold a conversation on this topic.

However, don’t forget to keep a vocabulary log for words that may appear in all situations, like…. appear, for example.

Tip #3: Keep temporary vocabulary lists that will help you read storybooks. (If you haven’t read my blog post on storybook reading, I suggest you do). In storybooks, there will be many words that you will probably never use in real life. This begs the question: Why should I learn these words? If you keep a list of these words, it will help you read this book comfortably without needing to look the words up in a dictionary every time you see them – this would make reading very boring. After you finish the book, you can throw away that list.

However, you should write words that may be useful in future in a vocabulary log that you keep, as these words may appear in the next book that you read – or they may appear in you next English exam!

Tip #4: Find little pockets of time to look at your vocabulary lists. Spend 10 minutes in the morning looking over the words that you learned the day before. You can do this over breakfast or while you are traveling to work or school (this is more useful than watching traffic or sleeping on the bus). While you are eating lunch, look at the words again for ten minutes. You can also do the same just before you go to bed. As a result, you will convince your brain that these words are worth learning. Perhaps the best result of all is that, if you are a student, you will not need to spend time learning vocabulary the week before an exam because you will already know it very well. For maximum effect, you should do this every day. Consequently, if you look at a list of words that you learned several days ago, you will find that you can remember most of them.

Learning English vocabulary

Tip #5: Do extra reading that is fun. Again, you can read my blog post about storybook reading. Also, find pages on the internet that relate to your interests. If you like movies, read people’s opinions about films on forums. You can find new vocabulary on these. You can also read magazines on your hobby.

Tip #6: Watch videos for fun. My previous blog post deals with this subject. (You see how all my posts are interconnected?). Make notes on vocabulary that the characters use often, and/or vocabulary that you think is interesting or useful to you.

Tip #7: always get a good night’s sleep after learning vocabulary. Psychologists say two things on this subject. First, language that is learned before you go to sleep is more likely to be remembered than language that you learn at another time of day. Second, if you don’t get enough sleep, your brain doesn’t have time to properly sort out the information that it saw that day. It’s similar to interrupting a download on your computer – the new program won’t work. Eight hours is a good length for sleep. Students who are learning a new language should get as much sleep as possible.

Tip #8: Add full explanations of difficult words to give the exact meaning because very often, if you look on Google Translate, it gives one-word definitions in your language but doesn’t explain the differences between similar words. For example, do you know the exact meanings of involve, include and contain? These words have some overlap of meaning, but in many situations, only one of them is correct. In your language, like in Turkish, there may be only one word (with exact synonyms) that covers the meaning for all three of those words. Using the wrong word may confuse the listener or reader. Therefore, for these words, write an explanation of its exact meaning in several words, and include some examples. If you don’t, you may not remember how to use it properly.

In conclusion, learning English vocabulary (or any other language) is a long and continuous process. If you try to learn something quickly (i.e. the night before an exam) you will forget it quickly – this is how the brain works. But the tips above should make learning vocabulary less tedious (if not fun), easier, and quicker.

Felicitations for perusing my cogitations! (Don’t bother learning these words!)