How to Improve Vocabulary: 7 Proven Ways to Memorize New Words

The best way to improve your vocabulary is to combine seven proven methods: listen to and repeat new words, use flashcards, attach images, memorize whole sentences, practice pronunciation, learn synonyms and antonyms, and watch films in the language you are learning. Then review each word with spaced repetition, right before you would forget it, so it moves into long-term memory.

Every language learner eventually asks the same question: how can I improve my vocabulary and actually remember all these new words? I asked it too. The answer I found wasn't one magic trick, but a handful of simple techniques that work even better together. These are the seven best ways to learn vocabulary that helped me most:

1. Listening to and repeating new words
2. Using flashcards
3. Creating visual associations
4. Memorizing whole sentences and phrases
5. Practicing pronunciation
6. Learning words with their synonyms and antonyms
7. Watching movies and videos in the language you're learning

One thing matters more than any single method: everyone's memory works a little differently. Some people remember words best by ear. Others need to write them down and read them again. Many find that pictures make words stick. So treat these methods as a toolkit and build the combination that works for you. That's exactly why we made Lingocard a free flashcards app that brings audio, images and spaced repetition together in one place.

1. Listen to new words and repeat them out loud

Best for: people who learn by ear, and anyone with little free time.

Listening to new words again and again is one of the easiest ways to remember them, as long as you listen to the right words.

You can find audio recordings of vocabulary for almost any course. But here's the problem I kept running into: after a few days, I already knew half the words on the recording and was still struggling with the rest. Listening to the whole recording over and over wastes time on words you already know. And the right number of repetitions, and the right pause between words, is different for everyone.

That's why we built the Lingocard audio player. You can remove the words you've learned and listen only to the ones you don't know yet. You can also choose how many times each word (or its translation) repeats and how long the pause between words should be, until it feels right for your memory.

You can create your own listening material, too: with Premium, upload any text file with translations to the player and press play.

This method is especially useful when you're short on time, because you can listen anywhere: on the way to work, at the gym or while cooking. And if you enjoy audiobooks, add the new words you hear to your list in the app and review them later in the player.

2. Use flashcards with spaced repetition

Best for: building a large vocabulary step by step.

Flashcards are the most popular way to build vocabulary: a hard-to-remember word on one side, its meaning or translation on the other.

I started the classic way, with paper cards. Once you have a deck, you go through it again and again, setting aside the cards you already know, until you've learned the whole deck.

After a couple of months, I had several hundred cards, and carrying them around became a real hassle. I also wanted to shuffle them in different ways: alphabetically, in reverse order, randomly or by topic.

So I turned to my smartphone, but I couldn't find a simple, convenient app for this. That's when I decided to build one. A couple of months later, I released the first Lingocard mobile app, with flashcards and a single word database. Next, I wanted every card to have audio and several ready-made databases of the most frequently used words. I started discussing the idea with developer friends. They liked it, and more enthusiasts soon joined the project. We kept adding new tools, and today the app is free on Google Play and the App Store in every country.

Going digital also fixed the biggest weakness of my paper deck: knowing when to review each word. In 1885, the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus showed how quickly we forget new information when we don't review it, a pattern now known as the forgetting curve. Lingocard's spaced repetition system works against it: it shows each word right before you're likely to forget it, so difficult words come back more often and easy ones less often. If you want to go deeper, read our full guide to flashcards for learning a foreign language.

3. Create visual associations

Best for: people with a strong visual memory.

Linking a word to an image makes it much easier to recall. For example, if you see an object and can't remember its name in the language you're learning, take a photo of it and write the word on it.

In Lingocard, you can add a photo from your camera or any picture from the internet to a flashcard. So if a word just won't stick, search for it online, pick a picture that fits and attach it to the card.

4. Memorize sentences and phrases, not just words

Best for: words with several meanings, and speaking more fluently.

Learning whole sentences is one of the most effective ways to grow your vocabulary. When you memorize a sentence, you learn several words at once, plus the way they fit together. Later, in a real conversation, you can use the ready-made sentence instead of building it word by word.

It's especially helpful for words with several meanings, which are very common in English. The easiest way to understand how such a word is used is to learn it inside a sentence.

Our site has more than 120,000 thematic word lists, and about half of them are made of phrases and sentences.

5. Practice pronunciation

Best for: remembering words you can already recognize but can't yet say.

Saying new words out loud, often and correctly, helps you remember them.

This works best right after listening: hear the word, then repeat it. Try saying it together with related words or inside a sentence.

Every Lingocard card has audio, so you can always hear the correct pronunciation. In the audio player, repeat each word out loud during the pauses. If you need more time, simply make the pauses longer in the player settings.

6. Learn words with their synonyms and antonyms

Best for: growing your vocabulary faster, a few related words at a time.

Memorizing a word together with words that mean the same or the opposite helps all of them stick.

Most of us think in associations, so new words are easier to remember when they come with similar or opposite words attached. You can put this to work by making flashcards with synonyms and antonyms.

You'll find synonym and antonym lists online and in most self-study books for your language. Save the words you need to a text file and turn it into your own Lingocard deck that works with all the app's tools: on a computer, the Flashcards Manager in the web app, included with Premium, builds thousands of cards at once from a word list. Plenty of ready-made decks with synonyms and antonyms are available, too.

This way, each new word brings its "neighbors" along, and your vocabulary grows faster.

7. Watch movies and videos in the language you're learning

Best for: everyday words, slang and idioms from native speakers.

Films are probably the most accessible way to improve your vocabulary, because you learn straight from native speakers in real situations, including the slang and idioms you rarely find in textbooks.

First, decide which variety of the language you want to learn. English, for example, has American, British and Australian versions, among others, so choose films from the country whose accent you want.

Watch with subtitles first. When you hear a word you don't know, write it down and review it later. I usually pause the film, look up the word and add it to Lingocard. Then I listen to all the new words in the player and practice them with flashcards.

To lock it in, watch the same film again later without subtitles. If you picked a film you really enjoy, the second time won't be boring at all.

With every film, you'll need fewer new cards, because your vocabulary keeps growing. The key is consistency: aim for at least one film a week in your target language, or, even better, watch everything in that language. It's the same routine I recommend to anyone who wants to learn English online: films plus a few minutes of flashcard review every day.

How to improve your vocabulary every day

Try all seven methods and notice which ones work best for you. Then keep these principles in mind:

1. Practice every day, even if only for a few minutes.
2. Use only the tools that really work for you.
3. Find the time of day when you learn best.
4. Keep track of how much material you've covered.
5. Set a clear daily goal and an overall goal for how many words you want to learn.

If you're starting a new language, begin with the words you'll meet most often, such as the 100 most common French words or the 100 most common Spanish words. Our guide to the frequency dictionary explains why learning the most common words first gives you the fastest progress.

If you teach a language, the same approach works for a whole class: you can teach vocabulary with Lingocard by sending ready-made word lists your students memorize with spaced repetition, or even run your own online language school.

Every method in this article is built into Lingocard. Just install the vocabulary app for your phone and sign up to keep your words synced in the cloud.

When I started, Lingocard was a small app for my own flashcards. Today it has grown into a global, all-in-one language learning platform for people in every country: flashcards with audio, ready-made word lists and frequency dictionaries, spaced repetition, speaking practice with learners and native speakers around the world, and tools for teachers who run their own online schools. I hope these methods help you learn faster and enjoy building your vocabulary as much as I do.