Memorizing New Vocabulary Have you ever felt that your memory capacity for memorizing a lot of new vocabularies is holding you back? If yes, don’t worry; I felt this way too! Learning a new language is difficult and requires endless effort. During ELI classes, students learn many new words. Learning a new word means recognizing it while seeing and hearing it, and being able to use while speaking and writing as well. Most of the time, teachers don’t teach students how to memorize and remember words. They only inform students about words they should know. Consequently, students need to use the following strategies to assist them to memorize new words easily and effectively. To begin with, whenever you hear or learn a word, write it down. It is much better if you have the words handy. Using flash cards is excellent option! After writing down the word on one side, look up for its form (noun, verb, adj, etc.) on dictionaries, and write it under or next to the word. Next, write the definition with the synonym on the other side. You may also write its pronunciation, which would be helpful to remember the word. If you don’t like papers, there are electronic flash cards too! In this case, you can benefit from applications such as Quizlet.
Afterwards, study the roots of the word, prefixes, and suffixes. For example, when you see a word like cooperative, you know that prefix (co) means together, and the root (operative) means work. Therefore, you can infer that cooperative means working together. After reading a word use mnemonics. Try to link it to a memory, something funny, or anything that helps you somehow to remember the word. For instance, the sound of the word pragmatic is similar to its synonym’s sound “practical”. They both start with “pra”, so you can think of this and memorize using this technique.
Subsequently, study the flash cards. After you wrote down the words and everything, read them for the second and third time. The next day, read the words again, but this time challenge yourself by only looking at the words and attempt to remember their definition. While doing this, put the words that you remember together, and put those you don’t remember together, so you can review them later. After a three days, go over all of them and review.