Memory hooks for vocabulary
Spanish arroz sounds like "a rose". That's the keyword method, the best-studied memory trick for foreign words, and here's how to write hooks that last.
A memory hook links a new word to something you already know. The best-studied kind for foreign vocabulary is the keyword method: find an English word or phrase that sounds like the new word, then picture it interacting with the meaning.
The Spanish arroz (rice) sounds like “a rose”. Picture a rose lying in a bowl of rice, and next time you see arroz, the rose brings back the rice. The Japanese ご飯 (gohan, rice, or a meal) sounds like “go, hand!”: picture your hand shooting out to grab a bowl of rice before anyone else can.
What the research says
The keyword method has been studied since the 1970s. In the classic study, students learning Russian words with keywords remembered far more than students who studied the same words any way they liked (Atkinson & Raugh, 1975).
The gains are biggest straight after learning, and over the long term results vary from study to study (Goñi-Artola & González, 2017). So hooks work best with spaced reviews: the hook gets the word in, and reviews keep it there. A hook won’t teach you how to use a word, though. For that you need to see it in sentences.
How to write a good hook
- Match the sound of the whole word, or as much of it as you can. “A rose” for arroz covers both syllables.
- Make it interact with the meaning. Put the rose in the rice. Images where things interact are remembered better; images that are just weird aren’t (Wollen et al., 1972).
- Make it yours. Put it in your kitchen, with your cat, or with you in it. Things that relate to you are the easiest to recall (Symons & Johnson, 1997).
- Come up with it yourself where you can, or at least choose between options. What you generate yourself sticks better than what you’re handed (Slamecka & Graf, 1978).
- Add the detail that slips. For Mandarin, give the hook a colour for the word’s tone. For Spanish, a colour for el or la. Then the detail is part of the picture, with nothing extra to remember.
- See it. A hook you can see is easier to bring back than a sentence you read, and a drawn picture saves you rebuilding the scene from scratch every review.
Where hooks get hard
Writing a good hook for every word takes time and imagination, and it gets harder as you go: by your five hundredth word, the easy sound-alikes are taken. In a normal flashcard app that’s a lot of work per card, and it’s easy to let it slide.
How Flashfriend does it
Flashfriend finds phrases that sound like each word and suggests a few scenes from them. You pick one, or write your own, and Flashfriend paints it in a place you know for the word’s first sound, with the tone or gender colour built in. For 米饭 (mǐfàn, rice), “fàn” sounds like “fan”, so your rice gets a fan.
Every word has audio, so you can hear how close the hook really is. You’re tested on each word just before you’d forget it, which keeps the hook from fading, and once you know enough words you meet them in sentences with one new word each, with grammar one pattern at a time. See all the memory techniques behind every card, or read about flashcards with pictures.
Checked on . Something out of date? Email [email protected].