Hi Sarah, I believe the method you apply makes perfect sense. What method is the best, each person has to decide individually. I normally decide what group of words I would like to learn first, what purpose they could serve best for my studies and apply my time by learning my new vocabulary from online or newspaper articles. Books are many people’s favourites, I am aware of that. Since I am more interested in current affairs, I prefer my method. Decide on this basis: what works best for you? I love listening to music in different languages. I find it extremely relaxing.
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I swear by Anki, if used properly it supports vocabulary learning in context
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I will be summarizing some scientific research that has been done on vocabulary acquisition and retention in my talk on October 22nd. There have been some empirical studies on what is most essential in studying vocabulary in order to make it stick. I hope you’ll come!
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Hi Billa, your methods are definitely worth copying. I let DuoCards do the memorizing for me. My mind seems to adequately and successfully adapt to it. But your ideas appear to enhance the standard methods. I find them inventive and clever. On another issue, certain comments lead me to believe that for some students, the pleasure of learning a new language takes a back seat. That should not be, in my humble opinion. Why are so many so competitively minded? Does it really matter if you are a Polyglot or just a language enthusiast? Just remember, as Socrates said: WER GLAUBT ETWAS ZU SEIN, HÖRT AUF ETWAS ZU WERDEN!
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I usually learn vocabulary through reading so that I don’t just get the dictionary meaning but rather how is the word being used in different context and nuances which the dictionary don’t and cannot show us
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For me, flashcards seem to create a mindset that their content is disposable! That is, they don’t lead to acquisition, to long-term learning, or (curiously) even to short-term learning.
My idea of ideal vocabulary learning: meeting a word multiple times in interesting contexts where not knowing it’s meaning doesn’t impede general understanding. After a fuzzy impression is created, a context comes along that clarifies the meaning AND that clarified meaning adds to the context: pure gold.
Next best: as above, but after a fuzzy impression is created, a context makes me SO curious that I look the word up–and the definition both clarifies the word’s meaning AND that clarified meaning adds to the context.
Also: etymology–that is, gaining a sense of how a word sits in the larger tree of related languages–is the best mnemonic, for me. It is an overarching context.
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@Billa thank you for reminding us we can talk to ourselves or pets! Off to practice the couple of irregular Irish verbs that are challenging me with my cat! 
I’m not a fan of flashcards (though I am working a little with the Goldlist method ).
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@Bando I just realized as I re-read your post that one of my Irish teachers has been using the TPRS method with us. Sharing a short story up on the screen with us and then asking us questions like this. I liked the approach, as it’s having us be more proactive in responding to the story. And it’s been fun, helping me to solidify some vocab I hadn’t totally absorbed. 
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Yes, I tried the Goldlist method as well. Found it a bit tedious after a while, but it worked surprisingly well.
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Totally agree. When you learn a language, the destination of your journey is the journey itself. It’s not about learning to speak a language like a native speaker as quickly as possible. That’s a very frustrating attitude. The more you learn the more you realise how much more there is to learn. We might as well enjoy the process of learning and make it as fun as possible. And somehow we will be getting better automatically if we do it right.
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Hi Lea, I like your article a lot. My experience of teaching English as a foreign language (TOEFL) originates from after the unification of Germany (from 1993 till 2015) when I was teaching Grammar School students from the old DDR (German Democratic Republic) in London. Mostly from Berlin and Brandenburg. Nowadays I only teach adult professionals in Slovakia. They are keen on English but the German language is still popular because Slovakia’s direct neighbours are Austria and Germany. Switzerland is not far away either. In effect, those are the three countries where German is a native language. Alright, the Swiss-German people do like to speak in Schwitzerdütsch, a dialect that is impossible to understand for students who studied German at University. I was born near the Swiss Border (I do understand and speak their dialect) in the Allemanic area of Germany, Austria and Switzerland (in the Rhine Valley / Bodensee or Lake of Constance), generally regarded as the most prosperous areas of Central Europe. Liechtenstein is also part of this special area.
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Yes, I did too… my biggest problem is that I’m sloppy with my handwriting and found there was never enough room on a line for both a sentence in my language as well as the translation. Also that it took me alot of time to write and 20 sentences would take me forever. Thinking of trying to restart though and lower my standards to 15 or 10 sentences. Right now I have two other smaller notebooks where I write down vocab from conversations that I don’t know, and I have hundreds of pages of those to pull from.
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I am also intrigued by this. Could you possibly share an example of how you do this? I have not used wheel charts before but have just googled them and think they could be an interesting option.
Hi Richard,
It’s a little hard to articulate over text, and for a more detailed overview, I recommend heading to the Saturn Theatre for my presentation “Framing Your Future Self”.
For the wheel chart, you start with regularly used / high frequency / simpler words closest to the centre, and as you branch out to the perimeter, the words get more nuanced… but have a shared relationship within each wedge.
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Thanks for the explanations, Candace. I’ll take a look at your talk!
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@Valentin , you’ve said exactly what I was going to say!
Yes, for me the most important as a beginner is to be curious and bothered enough to check words you come across in materials and then ONLY write down the ones that are suitable to your level / important.
After one gets to intermediate, it’s just a matter of persistence to read at least a book or two to refresh the memory of known words (and potentially write down more, of course).
Typically, I spend 15 mins a day to remember 10 words. But I never force myself on number. It’s more beneficial if one cares more about the relevancy of the words, I think.
In addition, my personal trick is to mix words amongst the daily additions, with words that (A) one feels already have a little reference to the words that he / she knows AND (B) completely new words. That way among the words need to be remembered each day, half of them are semi familiar. That can take the load away a little bit.
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