A ledger for words

Notes on learning vocabulary in a second language — what holds, what leaks away, and why the difference is mostly a matter of scheduling.

Most of the effort people put into vocabulary goes into the wrong half of the problem. Meeting a new word is easy; the language throws them at you faster than you can write them down. Keeping a word is the hard part, and it is a scheduling problem far more than a memory problem.

These pages are the notes I kept while working out a routine that survived contact with a busy year. They are not a course and not a method with a name. They are a short account of four or five ideas that made a visible difference, written down mostly so I would stop rediscovering them.

What turned out to matter

• Review late, not often. Practice pushed to the edge of forgetting is worth several easy repetitions done back to back.
• Recall, don't reread. Pulling a word out of memory strengthens it. Looking at it again mostly produces the pleasant feeling of already knowing it.
• Harvest, don't shop. Words taken from something you were actually reading outperform words taken from a list somebody else wrote.
• Store phrases, not glosses. A word paired with one sentence you met it in is a usable memory. A word paired with a one-word translation usually is not.
• Keep the deck small enough to be honest. A backlog you avoid opening is worse than a shorter list you actually finish.

None of this is original. Nearly all of it is decades old and reasonably well established; the only contribution here is the arrangement, and the admission of what did not work.