How to learn many words in a foreign language: techniques for the classroom and for self-study (Task 1 of 8)

Table of Contents

Introduction

In a previous article I argued that learning a language means progressively mastering eight distinct tasks. This is the first of a series that looks at each task in turn and asks a practical question: which methods can a teacher use in class, and which can a learner use alone, to master that specific task?

We start with Task 1: knowing an adequate number of words in the target language.

What Task 1 actually involves

Knowing a word, at its core, means possessing the association between a lexical form and a meaning. This association works in two directions, and the two are not equally hard. Receptive knowledge, going from form to meaning, is easier and comes first. Productive knowledge, going from meaning to form so that the word comes to you when you want to say something, is harder and comes later, through use.

Task 1 is about holding this form-meaning link. Actually recognising or producing that form in a particular medium is a different matter and belongs to other tasks: reading the written word (Task 2), writing it (Task 3), recognising it when a native speaker says it (Task 4), pronouncing it (Task 5). Here we are concerned with the underlying knowledge that all of those draw on, knowing that the form exists and what it means.

Task 1 also carries hidden extra loads depending on the language. In German, for example, you do not just learn the word, you have to learn its grammatical gender along with it, which adds a substantial extra element to be memorised with every noun. I deal with this specific problem at the end of the article.

One warning before the techniques. Task 1 should never be trained in isolation. A word you can only recognise on paper is half a word. From the very first day, pair the word with its sound (Task 4, recognising it when spoken) and with saying it aloud (Task 5, pronouncing it). Learn words with their voice, not just with their spelling.

Seven principles that make vocabulary stick

The techniques below all rest on a small number of principles. If you understand these, you can invent your own techniques.

1. Choose the right words. Do not learn random vocabulary. A relatively small core of high-frequency vocabulary accounts for a large proportion of everyday language, and speech is especially repetitive. Research on vocabulary coverage, notably by Paul Nation, indicates that the most frequent 2,000 to 3,000 word families already cover the great majority of ordinary spoken discourse. Start from a frequency list or from a frequency-informed course, then add the words your own goals require. A learner who needs German for tourism and one who needs it for chemistry share a common core, then diverge.

2. Words are learned through repeated, spaced encounters, not through single exposure. A word usually needs many meetings before it settles, and those meetings work far better when they are spread out over days rather than crammed into one session. This is the same logic as the gym: frequent short sessions beat rare long ones.

3. Retrieval beats rereading. Testing yourself on a word, trying to pull it out of memory before checking, fixes it far more effectively than reading the word and its translation over and over. Every technique that forces recall is worth more than every technique that only offers review.

4. Depth beats repetition alone. A word tied to an image, an example sentence, a situation or a personal association sticks better than a bare pair of words on a list. The more hooks a word has, the easier it is to retrieve.

5. Learn words in chunks, not in isolation. Learning “to make a decision” as a unit, rather than the single word “decision”, gives you the vocabulary and a ready-made combination at the same time. Chunks feed Tasks 6, 7 and 8 for free.

6. Do not learn similar words together. This is counter-intuitive and important. Teaching synonyms, opposites or members of the same set at the same time (all the colours, all the clothes, wollen and mögen and können together) creates interference: the learner mixes them up precisely because they are similar and were met together. Space them out. Introduce one, let it settle, then introduce the next. This is exactly the point I raised with my teacher in Berlin, and the research on vocabulary interference supports it.

7. Receptive first, productive later. Build recognition through large amounts of input, then build production through use. Do not expect a learner to produce on demand a word they have met only a handful of times.

Techniques for the classroom

As a teacher your advantage is that you control repetition and context. Use it deliberately.

Flood the input. Use the target words many times in your own speech during the lesson, supported by gestures, images, real objects and context, so that meaning is clear without translation. The students meet the words repeatedly and in use, not as a list to memorise at home.

Use images where they are more efficient than translation. For concrete words an image often fixes the meaning faster and more vividly than a translation, and it avoids routing everything through the first language. But translation is not the enemy: for an adult, saying that Hund means dog can simply be the quickest way to establish a meaning. Use whichever is more efficient for the word in front of you.

Use Total Physical Response for concrete and action words. Give commands, have students act them out. Standing up, pointing, moving, touching objects: physical response ties words to the body and to memory, and it works very well for beginners and for verbs and objects.

Build stories around a few target words. The storytelling approach (often called TPRS) takes a small set of words and recycles them inside a story that the class helps to build, asking and answering questions throughout. The same words come back many times, in context, with the students producing them, which satisfies principles 2, 3 and 4 at once.

Personalise. Ask questions that force each student to use the new word about their own life. A word attached to a personal fact is far stickier than the same word met in a neutral example.

Use games because they force retrieval, not because they are fun. Bingo, taboo, pictionary, running dictation, Kahoot or Quizlet Live all work for one real reason: they make students retrieve the word again and again under mild pressure. Choose the game for the retrieval it produces, not for the entertainment.

Recycle across lessons on purpose. Plan to bring back last week’s words this week, and last month’s words this month. Vocabulary that is not revisited is vocabulary that is lost. Spacing has to be designed into the syllabus, it does not happen by itself.

Set up spaced repetition as homework, and hold students to it. In class you cannot give each word the dozens of spaced encounters it needs. A spaced repetition app can, at home, between lessons. Teach the students to use it and check that they do.

Teach a few learning strategies explicitly. Show students how to make a good flashcard, how to spot cognates, how to guess meaning from context. These strategies pay off for the rest of their learning life, long after your course ends.

Techniques for self-directed learning

Alone, you lose the teacher’s controlled repetition but gain freedom to choose material you actually care about, which is a strong motivator.

Start from frequency. Get a frequency dictionary or use a course that is frequency-informed, such as DW Learn German or Nicos Weg for German. Do not waste early effort on rare words.

Use a spaced repetition app, and design the cards well. Anki is the standard tool. The tool matters less than the cards. Keep one item per card, add the audio so you also train the sound, add an image instead of a translation where you can, and add one short example sentence for context. Avoid overloaded cards that try to teach five things at once. Cards you make yourself tend to stick better than pre-made decks, because making them is already an encounter with the word.

Mine sentences from real content. Instead of pre-learning long lists, take the words and phrases you meet in things you actually read, watch or listen to, and turn those into your cards. The word arrives already attached to a context you cared about.

Read and listen slightly above your level. Extensive comprehensible input, material just beyond what you fully understand, is an important source of repeated encounters with vocabulary in context. Graded readers, tools like LingQ or Readlang for reading, and Language Reactor for subtitles on Netflix and YouTube, all let you meet many words in context and capture the ones worth keeping.

Label your environment. Sticky notes on objects in the house give you free, repeated, in-context encounters with concrete words.

Learn words when you need them. Looking a word up because you want to say something right now, capturing it, and reviewing it later, beats memorising a large list you may never use. Need creates the hooks that principle 4 talks about.

Say every new word aloud. This costs nothing and links Task 1 to Tasks 4 and 5 from the start, so the word becomes usable in speech and not only recognisable on the page.

Be consistent. Fifteen minutes every day beats two hours once a week. Spacing is not optional, it is the mechanism.

The German gender problem, and problems like it

For German, remembering the word is only half of Task 1. You also have to remember whether it is der, die or das, and for many nouns there is no reliable way to predict this. Some techniques reduce the load.

Never learn the bare noun. Always learn it with its article, as a chunk: hear and say “der Tisch” as one unit, not “Tisch” plus a separate fact about gender. The article becomes part of the word.

Encode the gender visually. Some learners find it useful to colour-code their flashcards by gender, for example blue for der, red for die, green for das, so the gender is carried by the look of the card rather than by a separate rule.

Try a mnemonic image for each gender. Another possibility, not a prescription, is to assign a vivid, consistent scene to each gender and picture the noun inside it, for instance every masculine noun exploding, every feminine noun on fire, every neuter noun shattering. The images are deliberately absurd, because absurd images are easier to recall. It suits some learners and not others.

Exploit the partial rules. German gender is not fully predictable, but some endings are reliable: nouns ending in -ung, -heit, -keit and -schaft are feminine, those ending in -chen and -lein are neuter, and so on. These rules do not cover everything, but they remove a chunk of the burden.

How many words, and how to tell you are getting there

For basic communication, the numbers are smaller than people fear. A few hundred high-frequency words together with a stock of useful chunks already let you handle many everyday situations, which is why I suggested starting with 100 to 200 words and expressions. For comfortable reading you eventually want several thousand word families, but that is a later goal, not a starting point.

Do not obsess over the count. A vocabulary app will tell you roughly how many words you are maintaining, and that is enough. What matters is not how many words you have parked in a list, but how many you can retrieve and use, out loud, when you need them. That is the difference between knowing about words and knowing words, and it is the whole point of Task 1.

A closing reminder from the opening of this article: Task 1 should not be trained alone. Tasks 4 and 5, recognising a word when it is spoken and pronouncing it so that others recognise it, are its natural companions and should be practised alongside it from the first day, so that the words you learn are usable in speech and not only recognisable on the page. The remaining tasks are taken up in the other articles of this series.