Remembering words

[William Camden]

On the subject of number of words in a given time, in the 1990s a work colleague, then nearing retirement, had trained in Russian when he was in the Royal Air Force in the 1950s, when National Service (conscription) was in force in Britain. He was among RAF recruits selected to be taught Russian. I asked him a few questions about his language training, which seems to have been fairly intensive. I asked how many Russian words they were expected to learn, and he said they were given a vocabulary list of about 200 words every week.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Ser ... _Linguists

This may have been where he learned Russian, although if I remember it rightly he said his language programme was RAF and this one involved all the armed services.

[Voytek]

A simple thing I do is to use the words in my daily routine even if I'm just speaking to myself. Usually before my day gets started I'll select a few words I already know along with a few new ones and make sure to put them to use. I pick words I know I'll encounter the object/activity for.

It`s a good method, you can also write simple texts in your TL using the words you`ve learned. I`m going to start writing in Spanish as soon as I`ve studied the grammar and put my writings on:
http://lang-8.com/
whereby Spanish native speakers will be correcting them for me and I`ll be able to correct my mistakes and learn from them.

Personally, for Swedish at A2 level I`m translating SwedishPod101 dialogues into my native language and I`m translating them back to spot the grammatical, logical and syntactical differences between the languages.

[mjd550]

I'm by no means fluent but intermediate. Learning words in context is best, I have had great results doing the luca method with two texts l1 ans l2. First learn what the Spanish means, translate. Then try to translate the English to Spanish.

Time consuming yes but it works.