How to remember French words 💾 retain vocabulary better with these 3 techniques

Have you ever learned a whole list of vocabulary by heart, would it be expressions, words or phrases, just to realise a few weeks later than you totally forgot it?

Don’t panic, you’re not alone.

In this article, I’m going to show you why you are forgetting and what you can do to remember your French vocabulary.

To me, learning by heart is a torture.

Actually, this is probably the reason why you don’t remember your French from school. You might have had great grades. But, in fact, the only reason why you passed is because you studied FOR THE TEST.

And that’s not an efficient way to remember your vocabulary.

Why is learning by heart not helping you remember in the long run?

Why is that? Surely, learning by heart is the MOST efficient way to learn long lists, right? Especially long lists of vocabulary that don’t necessarily make sense!

Well, part of that is true. If I told you to learn this list by heart right now, you will probably remember it for a bit:

Go ahead, learn it right now.

Now, if you are like most people, what you did to learn it is :

You said it several times
You might have written it once or twice
And then, you repeated it without looking at the list

And that’s it, you now remember it right?

The thing is, you probably won’t tomorrow, let alone remembering it in a few weeks.

(And we’re talking about a three word list, not a hundred words.)

Learning by heart has one advantage: it is quick and efficient for short term memory.

But that’s it.

I can almost hear you saying ‘what about the alphabet, I learned that by heart and I still remember it’. Yes, but that’s not the reason why you remember it.

Learning by heart is NOT the worst. It can give you the initial boost you need to start using the words correctly, but then, you’ll need to apply slightly different techniques.

And this is what we’re going to look at now.

What are the techniques you should use or how to remember french words more efficiently

Let’s say you still remember my list. (Do you?)

What could you do right now, to make sure that you remember those three words tomorrow? In a week? In a month? In 10 years?

To remember words, you need to move them from your short-term memory to your long-term memory. Right? Let’s take those three words again, and apply three different techniques.

L’escalier. La tarte. Le Soleil

(I had to check if I was using the right words)

1. Spaced Repetition

And THIS is mainly why you remember your alphabet. You did not just learn it once, right?

You had to ‘learn’ it several times, meaning, you repeated it several times over a long period of time.

Without diving too deep in scientific studies, I’d like to show you what the Forgetting Curve is.

This is how we forget. It can be applied to pretty much anything.

Check out how much you forgot after only 20 minutes, one hour,… That’s a lot right?

Although, there is one advantage to this curve. Can you guess what it is?

After a while, we stop forgetting as much. See, the curve is not as steep. What’s left of whatever we learned is stored in our long-term memory.

To counter our fantastic forgetting abilities, we simply have to restart the curve when we still remember.

So it would look something like this.

This is called SPACED REPETITION. And it simply means, to repeat the vocabulary when you start to forget it so that the forgetting curve is not as steep.

It can be done with flashcards, or with Spaced Repetition Programs like Anki or Memrise.

IN SHORT : Repeat and review what you’ve learned regularly to store your vocabulary in your long-term memory. And the more you will repeat it, the more you’ll remember it.

2. Make your vocabulary memorable

Could the answer be THAT easy? Actually yes.

Let’s go back to our alphabet example. Can you still sing the song? Do you still picture the frieze in the classroom?

I surely can! How can you apply this to your French vocabulary learning?

Easy peasy. Look at the questions I asked you. I used two verbs : PICTURE and SING.

Now it depends on your type of memory, but you’ll be WAAAY more likely to remember something when you associate a memory to it.

This is how native speakers are doing it right? They learn to speak by pointing at things, singing, and making memories around it.

Get your senses involved: listen, look, smell, taste, touch,.. Don’t just confine your vocabulary learning to writing or listening. Create memories around it.

Learn how to say boeuf while cooking a boeuf bourguignon for example.

(FYI, it’s one of the reason why immersion is so powerful).

But yes, sometimes you can’t create a new memory for each words.

In this case, you should associate your new vocabulary with memories you already have.

For example :

L’escalier = the stairs in my first house where I would go down the stairs on my butt

La tarte = my grandmother’s apple pie, so rich and sweet with sugar on top

Le Soleil = the sun from our holidays in Corsica when it was almost unbearable to stay outside

Now, create your own memories around those words, or select memories to remember them. And start straight on, with common words.

IN SHORT – Use your memories and senses instead of just the translated words to remember more easily.

3. Learn in context with sentence mining (AKA learning phrases over words)

If you are following me since a while, you’re probably getting tired of me repeating the same thing.

I have a whole article on Sentence Mining , which you can check out here.

So you know that sentence mining has plenty of different virtues: better pronunciation, better grammar, better vocabulary, easier fluency,…

But, here we’re going to look at how it’s going to help you MEMORISE more efficiently.

When you are learning lists of words, there’s two reasons why it is hard for you to use those words in conversations.

The first one, we saw together, it’s because your memory doesn’t work that way.

And second reason is because even if you remember the list, you remember it as part of a list.

And that’s not good right? You don’t want to remember the list, you want to remember the words on it.

For example, it would be way easier for you to remember the word TARTE as the second word of the list rather than as the French words for PIE. (You might remember my grandmother’s tarte at this point though).

One way to take advantage of our memories reflexes is to learn the words in context. That is to say, within sentences.

Sentence mining goes beyond that. Because you’re also learning about sentences structures, different meanings of words, cultural references,…

But, remembering a sentence allows you to access much more easily the right words when conversing or writing, because it is, after all, a mini list of words.

To be able to use the words from our list much more easily in conversation, here how I would learn them:

J’avais le soleil dans les yeux, du coup, j’ai glissé dans les escaliers et la tarte est tombée par terre.

So it might be easy for you to remember the first few words of a sentence, and then, your brain should be able to fill in the rest of the sentences: subject, verb, pronoun,.. (all in the right order!)

IN SHORT – Give contexts to your vocabulary by learning words within sentences.

There’s plenty of other techniques and tricks to remember words, like using images instead of translations, but it all comes down to repeating, putting the words in context, and generally making it more memorable.

So concretely, how should I learn my vocabulary?

Use the vocabulary you learned straight away, and make sure to review it regularly.

Learn while doing things, to create memories around your vocabulary

Use your vocabulary in sentences that you can easily remember

🎵 Annnnndddd IIII will always remember my vocabularyyyyYYYYyyyy 🎵

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2 thoughts on “How to remember French words 💾 retain vocabulary better with these 3 techniques”

David Dearman
October 8, 2018 at 2:23 am

Merci pour l’article. J’aime l’audio, mais le volume est un peu difficile à entendre.

Reply
1. Marie
  October 8, 2018 at 7:32 am
  
  Merci David 🙂 Je vais voir ce que je peux faire 🎶
  
  Reply

How to remember French words 💾 retain vocabulary better with these 3 techniques