I once had to memorize a lot of english words. My experience has taught me that : 1. Having people along who can learn with you helps a lot 2. making sentences out of those words help a lot 3. Reviewing one page of the words everyday helps. 4. the more you see a word, the more chance you have of remembering it. Does not have to be fixed intervals. 5. Marking all the words I remember in the first go with a pencil mark and marking the very difficult ones help. Then you can review the difficult ones more frequently. 6. Take a test everyday. See a word, try to recall the meaning. If you can't, guess it. Then make a sentence. Then, see if you were right or wrong. You might make the same mistake 4-5 times. But finally you will never forget the word. Do review 9-10 words everyday and you'll be fine :)

Hello Kane. First of all I have to say that you sound very fluent to me! I'm very impressed. I just wanted to say that what works for me is learning words and then actually USING them in real conversations. Even making out sentences using new words helps me to memorize them. But I'm pretty much sure that if I stop using those words I might forget them.

Hi there I don't know about English but I can talk about learning Japanese. I studied for their National Exam (it's only once a year) and did it a few times. Japanese has kanji (characters) and that's a new way for the mind of an English speaker to bend because each kanji = a noun or verb. PLUS, they are visually complex, so hard to decipher at first. Forget about learning to write! Plus, if one stroke or two strokes is different, totally different meaning! And the kanji section of the test DID test visually -- they weren't seeing if we knew the meaning, they were testing if we could pick out the right character visually. This was a new experience with learning and testing for me... Anyhow, I had cards with all the kanjis (with the character on one side and the hiragana on the other side) and just went through them all the time. I had a stack of cards, and if I could remember the meaning, I'd put it aside. If I couldn't recall, that card would go back into the pile and it'd come up again. Eventually, I'd get it. There is a simliar site with cards you can take a look at if you're interested in the method. http://iteslj.org/v/jre/katakana.html Finally, I want to say that this method of review is best implemented by TEACHERS. That is, if teachers organize their classes to have systematic reviews of new vocabulary -- including a little quiz at the beginning, and a little review activity in the middle and then again at the end (just, like, 10 items and it takes 5 minutes) then THAT works. Trying to memorize large amounts of vocabulary is going against natural learning, in my opinion. I'm a fan of step-by-step exposure to real language. What makes an emotional impression gets remembered. I've seen Chinese and Japanese learners working with bilingual cards trying to accomplish heroic feats of memory. That is how the first language is learned, so they approach second language the same way. I believe that extensive reading (reading for interest) is a best practice for building a large, passive vocabulary. It works for better retention because you're seeing words in context (discourse) rather than learning words on their own, linked to their first language equivalent.

Hi there I don't know about English but I can talk about learning Japanese. I studied for their National Exam (it's only once a year) and did it a few times. Japanese has kanji (characters) and that's a new way for the mind of an English speaker to bend because each kanji = a noun or verb. PLUS, they are visually complex, so hard to decipher at first. Forget about learning to write! Plus, if one stroke or two strokes is different, totally different meaning! And the kanji section of the test DID test visually -- they weren't seeing if we knew the meaning, they were testing if we could pick out the right character visually. This was a new experience with learning and testing for me... Anyhow, I had cards with all the kanjis (with the character on one side and the hiragana on the other side) and just went through them all the time. I had a stack of cards, and if I could remember the meaning, I'd put it aside. If I couldn't recall, that card would go back into the pile and it'd come up again. Eventually, I'd get it. There is a simliar site with cards you can take a look at if you're interested in the method. http://iteslj.org/v/jre/katakana.html Finally, I want to say that this method of review is best implemented by TEACHERS. That is, if teachers organize their classes to have systematic reviews of new vocabulary -- including a little quiz at the beginning, and a little review activity in the middle and then again at the end (just, like, 10 items and it takes 5 minutes) then THAT works. Trying to memorize large amounts of vocabulary is going against natural learning, in my opinion. I'm a fan of step-by-step exposure to real language. What makes an emotional impression gets remembered. I've seen Chinese and Japanese learners working with bilingual cards trying to accomplish heroic feats of memory. That is how the first language is learned, so they approach second language the same way. I believe that extensive reading (reading for interes