Possession of a rich, nuanced vocabulary is one of the fundamentals of language skill, vital to your capacity to speak, read and understand. Indeed, research has consistently shown vocabulary size to be the best single predictor of language competence and exam success.
Which is to say, to succeed in language exams, make sure you know all the words. The trouble is, GCSE and A-level students learn words ruinously slowly. Studies have shown that a speed of two per hour in the course of our school careers is the norm for learning speed: the mnemonic equivalent of taking 30 minutes to eat a crisp.
How to optimise this process? How to nail down a vast vocabulary in time for your exams? How to learn much, much quicker?
These are the questions we've been developing answers to the last three years at Memrise. Forgive me for talking directly about my own company on this blog, but we've now seen half a million people learn tens of millions of words, and we're beginning to gain a deep understanding of what you can do to learn words faster. While we'd of course encourage you to check out the site, the below description of the techniques our community benefit from are equally applicable to your offline learning, and general revision management.
Mems are visual mnemonic devices. They make a vivid connection between the form of a word, and its meaning. As an example, let's say you're trying to remember that "Caber" means "to fit" in Spanish. It's quite an easy word, but that doesn't stop it from being easy to forget too. You'll probably have forgotten it by the time you've finished this article - unless, of course, you're about to see a mem for it.
"You can barely FIT a BEAR into a CAB". Note the explicit association, the comic image. Think of this CAB-BEAR just about FITTING in, and you'll triple your chances of learning this word in the long term.
Mems are so effective both because they engage and amuse, but also because they create richer, less confusable, more robust and visual memories. They're best when they make special sense to you, or, even better, when you create them. So you should look at several mems and pick the best one for you, or create your own.
We forget most of what we learn – it's part of the design of human memory. We're tooled to remember things that recur, that are important enough to happen more than once. By circling back to the words you've learned, with increasing intervals the better you know them, you can catch memories before they fall into oblivion, and ensure you keep all the words you've bothered to learn fresh in memory. This kind of systematic review, where you don't cram but space your reviews out between other learning, is called Spaced Repetition.
By using Spaced Repetition proactively you can ensure all your good work never goes to waste, and right there you've probably boosted your speed of learning by a factor of two.
When reviewing words, don't just look at them. Test yourself. When you look at a word and definition and tell yourself "I know this one" you are indulging in the mnemonic equivalent of asking your mother for a reference. By actually testing yourself, you quickly get a more realistic picture of what you truly know.
But the importance of testing goes much beyond this. When you recall a word from a test, your memory for that word actually improves. This is because you are strengthening the habit of recalling the word by practising doing so. And the habit is the meomy. Ideally the tests should be as difficult as possible, to give yourself the most powerful practice. Adding this habit to your overall learning technique is again worth a huge boost to overall speed of learning.
Ed Cooke is a Grandmaster of Memory, and is co-founder and CEO of Memrise.
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