7 ways to learn English vocabulary faster

There's no trick that makes thousands of words stick overnight. But some ways of studying work much better than others, and over a few months the difference adds up. Here are seven that are well supported by research and easy to start with.

1. Start with the most common words

A small number of words make up most of what you read and hear. Words like "people", "make" and "because" turn up constantly, while "obfuscate" might appear once a year. So the first few thousand words give you far more return than anything rarer. If you're a beginner, a course or word list built around the most frequent words is a better use of your time than learning whatever happens to come up.

2. Read a lot, at the right level

Native speakers learn most of their vocabulary from reading, not from being taught, and it works for learners too, as long as the text is easy enough. If you know about 98% of the words on a page, the unknown ones usually make sense from context, and each time you meet them they stick a little more. If you're looking up several words in every paragraph, choose something easier and read more of it. Graded readers, written for learners at a given level, are made for exactly this.

3. Test yourself instead of rereading

Looking over a word list again feels productive but does surprisingly little. Trying to recall a word before you check does much more. Cover the meaning and try to remember it, or look at the meaning and try to come up with the English word. Even getting it wrong and then checking helps more than rereading.

4. Space out your reviews

Reviewing a word five times in one evening works less well than reviewing it five times over a few weeks. The best moment to review is just before you would have forgotten it. Flashcard apps that use spaced repetition, such as Anki, take care of the timing for you: words you know well come back rarely, and difficult ones come back more often.

5. Learn words in the phrases they come in

Words come with partners. You make a decision, catch a cold and go to bed, but you don't make a cold. Phrases like these are easier to remember than single words, and they're what you actually need when you speak or write. When you note down a new word, note down the phrase you found it in.

6. Meet each word several times, in different places

One meeting is rarely enough. Studies suggest it often takes ten or more before a word is really known, and it helps if they happen in different places: an article, a podcast, a conversation. That's another reason why reading and listening widely works better than memorising lists on their own.

7. Use the words yourself

Recognising a word and using it are different skills. To move a word into the vocabulary you actually use, use it: write a few sentences with it, put it in a message, say it out loud. It takes more effort than recognising it, and that effort is what makes it stick.

Putting it together

None of this needs hours a day. Ten or fifteen minutes of flashcard reviews, plus as much reading and listening as you can manage at a comfortable level, covers most of it. Learn new words in phrases, use a few of them each week, and every few months check how far you've come.

Further reading: Nation, I. S. P. (2006). How large a vocabulary is needed for reading and listening? The Canadian Modern Language Review, 63(1). Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3). Cepeda, N. J., et al. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3). Webb, S. (2007). The effects of repetition on vocabulary knowledge. Applied Linguistics, 28(1).