Learn words in context, not in lists

You open a list of 20 new words. You read it again and again. It feels easy. Three days later you remember four of them. This is not a bad memory.

Your brain keeps links, not lists

A word on its own has only one road to it. You must remember the word itself.

The same word inside a sentence has ten roads. Who did it. What happened before. How the speaker felt. The picture in your head when you read it.

Later, you do not need to find the right box. Any of those roads takes you there.

Three words in a sentence beat twenty in a column

Look at two ways to learn withdraw:

• A list: withdraw, to take money out of an account.
• A sentence: She withdrew two hundred dollars from her savings account.

The sentence teaches three things the list does not. Withdraw goes with from. It goes with an amount of money. And it belongs to banking, not to leaving a race.

What to do tonight

• For each new word, write one sentence about you, about today. "I withdrew money to buy coffee" stays longer than the example in the book, because you are in it.
• When a hard word shows up in the news, do not look it up and move on. Copy the whole sentence, not just the word.
• Five words with sentences beat twenty words with meanings. The length of your list is not the thing being measured.

This is also why practice in Lingua always shows a word inside a sentence, instead of a column of words with meanings next to them.