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Remember Vocabulary Fast

Hi, I’m Vanessa from SpeakEnglishWithVanessa.com. Do you have trouble remembering all the wonderful vocabulary words that you’re learning? You’re not alone. Let’s talk about it. If you’ve been learning English for longer than, say, five minutes, you probably have run across some new words.

In fact, the phrasal verb I just used, “run across,” might be new for you. How can you remember it? How can you retain that information, so that when you’re having a conversation, you can actually use it? Well, I have some good news. Today we’re gonna talk about 10 different things that you can do to remember, retain and use the vocabulary words that you’re learning.

Before we talk about these 10 tips for remembering vocabulary words, we need to talk about the three steps that happen every time that you run across a new word. They are: Recognizing, understanding, and using. The first one, recognizing, means that when you see a new word or you hear a new word, you think, “Oh, I think I’ve heard that before. I’ve heard the word ‘run across’ before.” The word that I just used. “I’ve heard that before, but I don’t really remember what it means exactly.” This is recognizing it.

You’ve seen it before, but you don’t remember exactly what it means. Then, the second step is understanding. Maybe after this video, you will understand what the word “run across” means, but you won’t be able to use it yourself. This means that when you read it in a book or you watch a TV show and you hear them say “run across,” you’ll think, “Oh yeah, I heard Vanessa use this.

I know what it means.” But when you’re having a conversation with an English speaker, it just leaves your mind and you forget about this word completely, because you’re not at the third and final step, which is using it yourself. I wanna let you know that there is a big gap between understanding a word and using it yourself.

You need to understand and run across this word a lot. You need to run across 20, 30, 40 times. You need to read it in books. You need to hear it on TV shows. You need to hear me say it. You need to run across a word, the word you’re trying to remember, a lot of times for you to be able to spontaneously use it in a conversation.

And that’s the final step, is using it. So I wanna let you know that when you learn a new word, you’re not gonna use it directly. You’re not gonna be able to just blurt it out and say it immediately. Instead, you’re gonna have to go through each of those steps. Recognizing it: “Oh yeah, I know this word, but I don’t really remember what it means.” Then understanding it, and then actually using it yourself.

So be patient with yourself when you learn a new word. Realize that you’re going through those three steps, and that eventually you will get to using it, but you need to have a lot of English input. You need to really run across those new words so many times that you can actually make it to the “using it” step.

All right, let’s get on with the 10 tips to help you remember and eventually use new vocabulary expressions. My first tip is to look it up on YouTube. What you’re looking for here is, you’re trying to find some insight, some new perspective, maybe a story that will stick with you. Let’s say that you hear the expression “odd job,” and you think, “Well, I know what ‘odd’ is, kind of weird and strange.

And I know what a job is. Does this mean a weird or strange job? I don’t know. I wanna use it correctly.” So you search on YouTube, “odd job.” You’re hoping to hear this word repeated a lot so that you can make it from recognizing to understanding to using, and you come across or you run across the video that Dan and I made about vocabulary, including the word “odd job.”

You listen to that a couple times. You hear Dan’s stories about his odd jobs. You hear my stories about the odd jobs that I had, and you realize, “Oh, it’s not actually a weird job. It’s just a kind of side job. Babysitting, walking dogs, washing windows. Some kind of side job. Now I understand it.” So you need to repeat it a lot in order to actually use it, but looking it up on YouTube is a great first tip.

You’re gonna hear it correctly. You’ll hear a native speaker pronounce it, and maybe you’ll hear a little story that will help it to stick in your mind. My second tip is for people who learn well visually. For me, when I hear a new word in another language, it’s really difficult for me to remember it only by listening.

I really like to see the words, that I can visualize it, and it just helps it to stick in my mind better. So I recommend when you hear a new word, when you see a new word, write it down in a notebook. But don’t write only the word. Write at least one phrase or better yet, write a full sentence and maybe write some of your own sentences. Let’s say that you wanna use the word that I just used, “at least.”

Well, you could look it up on YouTube and find my lesson about it, or you could write your own sentences about it. This is gonna help you to create language, use it yourself, but also it’s reinforcing visually what the word looks like, to help you remember it. Connected to number two is number three, which is to write a comment using the new expression that you just learned.

You’re here on YouTube, so I imagine that you watch other lessons about vocabulary and grammar on YouTube. Use it immediately. Write a comment using that expression. You’re using the word. You’re seeing it visually. You’re interacting with other people, so it’s more of a real life situation than just using a notebook.

You’re hoping that other people will actually be able to understand your sentence, and maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll even get some feedback about it. Tip number four will help you with some muscle memory. It is to read out loud the sentence that you wrote in your notebook, the sentence that you wrote in the YouTube comments, or even a sentence that someone else wrote.

This is helping you to use your own muscles, and also helping you to get over the fear of hearing your own voice using English. I know for me, when I first started speaking some Korean when I lived in Korea, it was so weird to hear my voice using these words that I had just learned, so I needed to get over it.

I needed to just do it and use these words out loud. So even though you might not be spontaneously creating sentences, you’re just reading them, it’s gonna be repetition and it’s gonna help you to slowly step by step be able to use it spontaneously. Tip number five uses muscle memory and is also great for visual and kinesthetic learners. It is to draw a picture of a new expression when you learn it.

So let’s imagine that you hear the word “rain check.” “Can we take a rain check?” And you think, “Rain check? I know what rain is. I know what a check is. What’s a rain check?” So you look it up on YouTube. You write a comment about it. You read it out loud, and then you think, “Well, I wanna take it to the next level.”

So you open your notebook again and you draw a picture of a rain check, so that you can really ingrain this in your memory. If you’re curious, a “rain check” means you’re just gonna delay something because something came up. Something happened and you have to delay your event, so you might say, “Hey, we need to take a rain check. We need to do it tomorrow instead of today.”

So now in your notebook, you can draw a picture of a rain check. You could either draw a literal picture of a rain check: a check with a rain on it, or you can draw a picture depicting this. This is great if you enjoy drawing, of course, and if you enjoy learning visually and also by using your body, moving your body and drawing, it’s gonna help ingrain these words in your mind. Tips number six and seven go together.

The first one, number six, is to learn maximum five new expressions per week. This might not seem like too many expressions, but after a couple weeks, it’s gonna build and build and build, and if you try to learn 20, 30, 40 expressions per week, it’s just gonna feel overwhelming and your brain’s actually not gonna be able to remember them enough to use them.

So tip number seven is to go back and review past expressions using apps like Anki. Anki is an excellent app and you can write kind of like, digital flash cards. You can write the expressions. I recommend writing full phrases or sentences using those expressions, and it will use a spaced repetition system, SRS, so that over the next couple days, it will show you those words again and you can try to guess correctly what they mean, the sentences that they fit in, but it will also help you to review past words. So you’re gonna see those past words that you learned at certain intervals: every three days, every five days, every week. This will help you to remember it because repetition is key.

My number eight tip to help you remember new vocabulary words is something that’s great to do while you’re driving to work or while you’re sitting on the train. You’re just kind of having this empty free time. It is to name things around you. This is really helpful for learning daily vocabulary, and you’d be surprised.

Even if you have an advanced level of English, there are probably plenty of things around you that you don’t know what they mean. And a good thing you can do is when you see something that you’re not sure what it is, maybe you see this. It’s a pillow, and you think, “Oh, I heard the word for that a long time ago but I forget.

Oh, I haven’t used it in a long time.” So you look it up. Maybe you write it in your notebook in your native language, or you draw a picture of it so that you can go back later and look it up in the dictionary. “What is that?” And you see, “Oh, it’s a pillow.” Great. Now you have an association with this thing in your house, and that links to the next tip.

The next tip is to make associations with new vocabulary and other words in English, or possibly even words in your own language. This could be things that sound similar. So for example, this is a pillow. This includes the word “pill.” Pill, a pill is something that you take like medicine if you’re sick. So you could think, “Oh, this pillow is filled with pills. It’s not filled with cotton or cloth. It’s filled with pills.”

This is gonna create an association between these two words, and instead of learning just one vocabulary word, you’ve learned two, and now you’re helping yourself to understand and remember it so that eventually you can use it. My final tip, tip number 10, is to quiz yourself. This is not a sponsored video, but I recommend using Quizlet. Quizlet is a cool app. It’s a website.

You can create your own flash cards, kind of like Anki. But the cool thing is that you can also use other people’s flash card systems, their digital decks of flash cards. So you can go on the app Quizlet, and you can type in “advanced English vocabulary,” and you’ll find tons of quizzes that include advanced English vocabulary that other people made. But you can also make these yourself.

So let’s imagine that at the end of this video, you realized, “Wow, Vanessa used quite a few words that I’ve never heard before or I just don’t use myself. I’m going to go on the Quizlet app. I’m gonna write in those words, and I’m going to quiz myself.” I’m gonna write a list of all of the useful vocabulary expressions that I used in this video. I’m gonna write them in the description, so if you’d like to use those and quiz yourself with either Quizlet or Anki, or you’d like to make some pictures in a notebook or write your own sentences, you’re gonna be able to see those words, which is one, repetition.

But if you use them yourself in all of these different ways, it’s gonna help you to use them eventually yourself spontaneously in conversation. I hope that these 10 tips to help you remember English vocabulary were useful to you. Use some of them. Use them in the comments. Write your own sentences. Read them out loud. Draw some pictures. Name things around you.

Try to really repeat these words as much as possible because you want to move from recognizing the words to understanding them, to using them yourself. Let me know in the comments, do you have any other tips to help you remember vocabulary words? Let us know. Let’s learn from each other.

Thanks so much for learning with me, and I’ll see you again next Friday for a new lesson here on my YouTube channel. Bye.