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There are many ways of learning a foreign language. Whatever way you chose, you have to deal with simple vocabulary learning as well (there are some exceptions though - I will come back to this in a later post).

Many methods for learning vocabulary exist. They vary a lot - from reading the vocabulary list in your exercise book to using mnemonics and intelligently scheduled repetitions. If you are using a computer to help you learn vocabulary, there is a lot of “Flash Card” software out which emulates the manual method of using Question&Answer index cards and reviewing stacks of them.

There is usually a confusion between learning a new vocabulary item and remembering it. You have to learn it initially and then take care that you do not forget it by reviewing it regularly.

The problem of most flash card software: you have to decide when and what to learn. If you have too big gaps between your repetitions, the time and effort will skyrocket, if they are too short you are learning inefficient. The best way is to let the software decide when and what to repeat/review. It has the benefit that the computer using an good algorithm is far better in scheduling what to review than you are. It will also make it harder for you to procrastinate. You have to do a number of repetitions each day. The key to efficient/effective learning is to do your review regularly (that means every day).
As I said - there is a lot of software out there, but only a few that schedules repetitions for you:

• Pauker, free (using the Leitner Card File system)
• Supermemo, commercial (using the Supermemo algorithm)
• FullRecall, commercial (using an artificial neural network)

There are some other programs as well. All of the programs above are using different scheduling algorithms. Many users claim that supermemo has the most efficient scheduling algorithm but I think it is not very important which one you use, as long as you do your repetitions every day. These programs are for repetitions only, you have to actually learn the vocabulary items first (an exception is “Pauker”). A very good way to do this is using mnemonics. Mnemonics is a big and interesting topic which can not be covered in this post. You can find further information here:

• The Memory Book
• Mindtools

This entry was posted on Friday, March 17th, 2006 at 6:30 pm and is filed under learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.