How to memorize vocabulary in a new language

A common way to learn vocabulary is to read a word and its translation over and over. It works, slowly, and many of the words fade within weeks. A handful of memory techniques make each word far easier to keep, and once you’re used to them, most take only a moment per word.

1. Learn the most useful words first

The most frequently used words of a language cover a huge share of everything you’ll read and hear. Learn those first, in order, and every word you learn turns up again soon, which helps it stick. Lists of the most common words are easy to find. Here are the first hundred for Spanish and Japanese.

2. Make each word mean something to you

Connect a new word to your own life: the café you go to, a friend’s name, the street you grew up on. Things that relate to you are remembered better than things processed any other way (Symons & Johnson, 1997), and that holds for words in a foreign language too (Pruss et al., 2025).

3. Use a memory hook for the sound

Find an English word or phrase that sounds like the new word, and picture it with the meaning. Spanish arroz (rice) sounds like “a rose”: picture a rose in a bowl of rice. This is the keyword method, one of the best-studied memory tricks for foreign words (Atkinson & Raugh, 1975). More in memory hooks.

4. See it as a picture, with things happening

Your memory holds onto pictures better than words, so a picture gives the word a second way back (Paivio, 1971). Make the things in it interact: a rose in the rice. Interacting images are remembered better than things side by side (Wollen et al., 1972). More in flashcards with pictures.

5. Come up with it yourself

What you produce yourself is remembered better than what you’re handed (Slamecka & Graf, 1978). Choosing your own scene for a word, even from a few options, does more than reading someone else’s.

6. Test yourself, then space it out

Try to recall each word before you look at the answer: recalling fixes a word far better than rereading it (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006). Then review it again at growing gaps, from days to months. Spacing is the best-supported finding in learning science (Cepeda et al., 2006). More in how spaced repetition works.

7. Meet it again in sentences

Once you know a few hundred words, read sentences where only one word is new. You understand the whole sentence, so the new word comes with context and grammar, and the old words get practice. More in sentence cards.

A daily routine

1. Each day, take the next few words from a list of the most common ones.
2. For each, make a quick scene: a sound-alike hook, in a place you know, with the things in it interacting.
3. Review yesterday’s words and anything due, recalling each before you check.
4. Once you have a base of words, add sentences with one new word.

Ten new words a day is a good start. If reviews feel light, add more; if they pile up, add fewer.

For your language

• Mandarin: remember tones and characters.
• Japanese: remember vocabulary, and furigana.
• Spanish: remember vocabulary and noun gender.

How Flashfriend does it

Flashfriend is built around all seven. It picks the most useful words first. For each word you pick a place you know and a scene from a phrase that sounds like it, and Flashfriend paints the picture, with the tone or gender colour built in. Every word has audio, and you’re tested on each word just before you’d forget it, with a longer gap each time you remember it. Once you know enough words, sentences with one new word begin, and grammar arrives one pattern at a time. See the memory techniques on our homepage.