Hi. I am trying to improve my English language and I am focusing on improving my core vocabulary. It would be a great help if someone can suggest Which memory technique is best to learn OALD’s (Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary) core English words which comes around 3000 to 5000 words. Thanks
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Hi. I don’t know. But you could make groups of similar words and relate with a locus.
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You’ll want to link the new word by imagining something that the word sounds like. Break it into syllables like fervent sounds like fur and vent…and have it interact with another image representing the definition. You can use your 1st language too if the sounds of an English word are close to a word in your 1s language.
Say you want to learn the definition of fervent showing intense emotion. You could imagine at a location a vent coming from the wall or ground that has fur all around or coming out of it. Whenever you breathe the air from it whatever emotion your feeling becomes very intense until you step away from it. Or you could picture those emoji icons with extreme anger or sadness come out of this vent. It doesn’t help much with spelling youll get the correct sound of the word though. And sometimes can tweak the image to get you on the correct spelling. Maybe the vent is shaped like an e to help you remember it’s fer vent not furvent.
Thanks for this detailed answer. I will try this out.
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Depends a lot on what kind of word you’re trying to learn, honestly. The keyword/sound-link method which I’ve been using works well enough for concrete nouns where you can anchor the sound to a vivid image, but once you get into the abstract range it starts to slip because you end up building a metaphor on top of a metaphor and then during review you can’t remember which part was the word and which was the meaning. A big chunk of the 3-5k OALD words are abstract (things like “fervent” or “tentative” or “incumbent”), so you’d be fighting that slippage pretty often.
Anki for spaced repetition is worth combining with whatever technique you pick, because it keeps the words cycling back before you forget them. What I’ve noticed is that the words i actually hold onto are usually the ones where something went slightly wrong during review, like I blanked on it twice in a row or mixed it up with a similar word, which makes me think the technique might matter less than whether the word caused you any friction on the way in. The bigger gap I’ve run into personally is between recognizing a word on a card and actually being able to use it when speaking or writing. No memory technique really closes that without some follow-up reading or use in context… I don’t know, maybe that’s just me. 