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You know this feeling? You learn a new English word today and by next week it's gone. Oof. And even if you do remember it, somehow it never comes out of your mouth when you're speaking. And that just feels so frustrating. That's because there is a big difference between the words you understand and the words you can actually use. And our goal isn't to eliminate this gap completely, but to make it smaller, so more of the words you know actually show up in your speaking and writing. So, in this video, I'm going to share the exact strategies I use to learn over 10,000 words in
English to reach the level I have right now. Hey friends, welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, hi, I'm Veronica. On this channel, I share scienceback strategies and personal experience to help you become fluent in English and learn languages in a more enjoyable way. And if you want to take your learning a little further, check out the links below because I have my language learning corner and notion template to organize your studies and keep track of all of the vocabulary you're learning and my self-paced course, the language mastery program to help you
understand the science of language learning. All right. So, let's first talk about the difference between passive and active vocabulary. Because when it comes to growing our vocabulary and memorizing new words, we really have to understand this one thing here. We all have a larger passive vocabulary than active vocabulary. And it will always be this way. It is completely normal. Even native speakers understand more words than they can confidently produce. Passive vocabulary includes all of the words that you can recognize or understand when you come across them.
Even if you don't really use this word when you speak, but you still know what this word means, it becomes a part of all of the words that you know. And your active vocabulary consists of the words that you can confidently use when you're speaking or writing. And so, yes, when we're working on memorizing and acquiring new words, we are trying to make this gap between your passive vocabulary and your active vocabulary smaller. But we're not trying to get rid of this gap because it is not possible. Before we start talking about a big memory challenge that prevents us from
retaining new vocabulary, I want to quickly share a tool that I have been using in my research, Merlin AI. It's basically an all-in-one AI platform that gives you access to all of the major models, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini without paying for each one separately. Instead of $20 a month for just one AI, with Merlin, you get access to all of them. And after using my discount code, it comes out to around $5 a month. I used it when putting this video together. For example, I asked Merlin AI to help you understand why we forget new words in English so quickly
and how to work with our memory in the most efficient way. I like that it's fast, clean, and it doesn't lock you into a single model, so you can explore all of them. Another feature I love is projects. You can organize all of your research, your notes, your custom prompts in one place. It keeps everything very easy to revisit, which makes it much less overwhelming than using 10 different tools. If you want to give it a try, you can use my link in the description and my discount code to get 75% off. Huge thank you to Merlin AI for sponsoring today's video. All right,
so now let's talk about this one big memory challenge that explains why we forget new words so easily. And the answer is the forgetting curve. Hermann Ebbinghaus, a 19th century memory researcher, showed that if we don't review the information we learn, we will forget a portion of it within hours or days of memorizing it. He basically explained that our memory doesn't work like this. You know, you see a new word and then you remember it forever. I wish in fact our memory because of the forgetting curve, it works exactly like this. You learn a new word and then the process
of forgetting begins. And this process is actually extremely fast. Essentially, it's like right after you learn a new word in English, the clock starts ticking on how quickly you'll forget it unless you reinforce it. That is exactly why everyone always tells you that cramming doesn't work. You know, sure you can cram before an exam and then the next morning you wake up, you go, you pass your exam and everything is great. But in reality, you haven't actually internalized all of this knowledge because you kind of crammed all of this in one go. And then sure, the next morning you
still remember some of it, but then a month later, two months later, because you don't actively reinforce all of this knowledge, you forget everything. Okay. So now let's actually talk about all of the strategies to reinforce all of these words and to fight the forgetting curve. And to showcase the strategies, I'm going to be using an example of a person who really likes surfing. Like this is their biggest hobby. I have found this video about surfing on YouTube that a person who is interested in surfing is probably going to be interested in watching. So, the first strategy
is building your personal vocabulary bank. Instead of trying to memorize random lists of words that you see online, just ask yourself what you like to do every single day. Like, what does your day look like? What are your hobbies? What is your job? And all of those things are going to be a part of your personalized vocabulary. Then you just go deeper on these topics. You increase immersion. You increase comprehensible input. And so the same words that you need to know, they will repeat naturally. Let's say the person who really likes surfing, their personal vocabulary
bank is going to be very different from a person who really likes AI. And that is okay because we're all different. The most important thing is creating your own personal vocabulary bank. Repetition will be possible because you're going to be constantly watching YouTube videos about the things that you like, reading books or listening to podcasts. All of these words are going to be retained in your memory because they're connected to the context of yourself of the things that you do every single day. You know these words are going to be associated with specific places,
specific people or maybe specific emotions that you were experiencing while practicing something that you really like. Let's say from this vlog that I have chosen to show you guys about surfing. From this video alone, you can learn words like longboard, shortboard, GoPro, wet suit, wax my board, current, wave break. If this sport is a part of your life, you will need to use these words constantly every single day. Now, let's move on to this next strategy using thematic islands. The principle here is instead of trying to memorize random words, you're trying
to memorize clusters of related words together like a single theme that all of these words are connected to. This way, all of this vocabulary is going to be connected in your brain like small little islands of vocabulary instead of being just like completely random. And so, because of that, it's going to be easier for you to recall them when you're speaking, when you're writing, when you actually need to use them. Again, let's say from this YouTube video, a big theme that we can notice here is surfboards. And so you can notice some words that are connected to this
topic or maybe you can ask JGBT to help you create a specific theme and all of the words that are connected to this theme. Shortboard, longboard, leash, wax, paddle out, duck dive, wipeout. So now instead of just memorizing one board like shoreboard let's say you have a whole island that you can activate together like all of the words that are connected to your surfing board. And of course all of this will actually start to click in your memory when you surround yourself with enough comprehensible input. You will see those words again and again. And that will really
help you with retention. The idea behind immersion and why I talk about immersion so often is that you are trying to internalize your vocabulary. And basically what it means is you absorb a word so deeply that you can use it automatically without thinking. There's also this really interesting phenomenon called bother minehof phenomenon. I really hope I'm pronouncing this correctly. What it basically means is your frequency illusion. It's, you know, when you notice something for the first time, let's say a word, a word in English, you notice it, you memorize it, and then you just
see it everywhere for some reason, and it just feels like everyone around you is using this word that you have just memorized. It's because your brain tagged it as important. So now you see this word everywhere. You notice it everywhere because your brain thinks it's important to notice this word. The next strategy you can use is sentence mining. And basically what it means is instead of trying to memorize words, you memorize phrases or sentences because all of this creates context. And context is so powerful for our brains. It's much more appealing than just random words or lists
of random vocabulary. Context is connected to stories, situations, emotions. And that is why our brain wants to memorize those things. The reason why a lot of us just can't memorize new words is because those words are too boring or too hard or the combination of both. They're both boring and hard. And so if it is possible for you, if you're not preparing for an exam, just skip those words for now. Maybe, you know, in a month or two, in a year, those words are going to be easy. you're going to be able to imagine yourself using them. From this YouTube video about surfing,
I saved the sentence. I got a brand new custom shortboard and it's beautiful, but I suck on it because my back isn't at full strength. So, this sentence is quite long and maybe for some of you, you're going to see a lot of new vocabulary. And that is why you can just break it down into phrases. Again, instead of memorizing words, you can memorize phrases. if a sentence is too long. The big advantage that you get from memorizing vocabulary this way is that you learn words in their natural setting in a natural sentence. It helps our memory create little, you know,
cues, little things that help us identify this word, recognize it and retain it. Okay. The next strategy you can follow to memorize new vocabulary efficiently is generating images. Memory sticks when the image is personal and emotional, not just generic. The easiest thing you can do is you can just continue searching and really find that image that makes you think that, okay, now I memorize this word. The second one is you can take your own photo. Maybe if you're surfing, you can ask someone to take a picture of you while duck diving. Obviously, it is not going to be
possible for every single word that you memorize, but this is a great strategy nonetheless. And the third strategy that you can use that is also very easy is using AI and generating your own images, your own pneummonics, images to help you memorize a specific word. For me, when I look at the phrase duck dive, I just think about a duck. So that is why I'm going to ask Chad PT to generate an image for me of a duck surfing and that is going to help me memorize this phrase duck dive. Again, some people are going to think your image is absolutely crazy like they're going to
not understand how it helps you. But the most important thing is it helps you. It's personal. It's creative. It's emotional. And that is exactly what helps our memory. The next big strategy that is going to help you retain all of the new vocabulary is spaced repetition systems, SRS, and active recall. If you like to create your own paper flashcards, you're probably already using this classic lightener flashcard system, which is basically this manual way to space out your reviews. You have your paper flashcards and you create three boxes or three piles. The first one
is for all of the words that are easy for you to recall. So let's say you use this pile. You review this pile once a week. And then the second pile is for all of the words that are, you know, medium hard, like not too easy, not too hard. So you review them twice a week. And then the third pile is for all of the words that are really hard for you to memorize. So you have to review this file three times a week. Another method here is for those of you guys who love using a notebook. It's called the gold list method. So, if you like to write down all of your words in your notebook,
what can you do here? You have this head list like all of the new words you're trying to remember and then you do the first distillation and then you do your second distillation and then you do your third distillation completing the circle or the square, however you want to call it. The idea is that the words that you put in those distillations are the ones that you actually forgot. And so that is why you're rewriting them over and over again and studying them over and over again. Obviously, these tools that I have just mentioned, the lightener system and the goal list method, they
are all about, you know, having paper flashcards or maybe a notebook. And some of us just don't like doing that. like we don't like using notebooks and paper flashcards and that is why you can use Anki and that is the tool that I use. It's an app that has a very powerful algorithm. It basically shows you the words right before you're about to forget them. And that really helps optimize your active recall because we actually want to see those foggy words like words that you are constantly forgetting more and more often. And the words that we feel confident in,
we don't need to see them every single week. Sometimes we see them once a month or once every two three months. And that is absolutely okay as long as you still recall them. And that active recall is the most important thing here. The tool itself matters less than how you use it. You have to practice recalling the words because I see a lot of people when they do their reviews, they just flip it over. They read the definition and they continue. That is not active recall. Active recall is when you see a word, you try to come up with your own definition. You think for
a few seconds, okay, what does this word mean? How would I describe it? How would I use it in a sentence? And only then do you flip the card over. Okay. And the final strategy that I really hope is going to help you memorize new words is basically creating a custom wallpaper for your phone or maybe you know putting sticky notes on everything you have in your apartment. Let's say you have like a few words that you want to remember. So you can create a wallpaper for your lock screen and then every single time you pick up your phone, you're going to see these words. And obviously we
all look at our phones probably like a hundred times every single day. And so this repetition is going to help you with your memorization. Is going to help you activate all of this vocabulary and start using it when you speak and write. And also something that I always recommend is making sure that you know how to say all of the words that you have in your room, in your apartment. And if you feel like you constantly forget what this specific object is called, you can just put a sticky note on it. This way, you're going to see and engage with these words very,
very often because you probably spend a lot of time in your room or in your apartment. And so, you're going to look at those sticky notes over and over again. Okay, I think it's going to be it for today's video. If you liked it, please don't forget to give it a thumbs up and subscribe to my YouTube channel. Leave me a comment if you found the information I shared today useful. I really, really appreciate it. If you want to check out my notion template for language learners and also my self-paced course, all the links are going to be down in the description. Also, if you use my link
and my discount code, you'll be able to try Merlin AI with a 75% discount. I'm not a native English speaker, but I have spent years working on my pronunciation and my accent. So, if you want to see how I got my American accent in English, just click right here and keep on watching this
