Hi my name is Rob, I found this forum a few months back in my quest to improve memorization techniques. I am a student in my second year at university. I currently use Anki to memorise the word lists but it takes a very long time and my recall and ability to recreate language is poor using this technique.
Most weeks there are 50-100 new words to memorize. If anyone here has any suggestions on how I can improve my foreign language vocab acquisition using memory techniques I would greatly appreciate them
Hi. I dont know much but I generate an Image and try to connect. I speak spanish. like pere in french is father I believe. I can memorize it because pere seems perro. Dog. I can imagine a Dog (perro) bites a father. Seems difficult for a lot of words but is fun for me.
Anki (or similar) is the right base approach. But like all language learners, youāre finding that some vocabulary just doesnāt āstickā as easily.
So try to make further connections between the source and target word (i.e. between English and Russian). This could be:
using knowledge of etymology, or similar words in other languages. Does the Russian word remind you of an archaic English word? Or a French word? Or a Latin word? (Depends on your existing knowledge of languages).
an artificial mnemonic. In Spanish, despertar[se] means to wake [oneself] up. My friend said āah itās like you wake up and youāre desperateā, which doesnāt make sense, but the idea nevertheless made it stick. If you look for something like this, it can be very effective. Try to keep it simple but be creative.
These mnemonics are temporary steps on your journey to accessing these words directly from memory. Ultimately you will lose the mnemonic and recall the word directly.
I speak a few languages, I find that with new words I have to start using them straight away to remember - for example, in Russian there is eggs, ŃŠ¹ŃŠ°, and I will actively find other related words like cheese, ŃŃŃ. Once I have a small list of related words, no more than six words, I will read recipes in Russian and look to see if I can find those words in them. It is like doing a word search, and if you put the words from a couple of lists into a word search creator you can have some fun practicing spelling by searching for those words.
I also put the words into an audio list to play while Iām trying to sleep or have a spare moment
Chunking, encoding, memory pallace , mind maps, all of these techniques are effective , some of them more than others in specific cases , but in general all they are effective .
