Brain Tricks to Help you Remember Vocabulary Longer

Learning a language is hard. Why? Because learning a language means memorizing words, lots and lots of words. Just when you have memorized one list, another list pops up and you have to start again and while you are learning those new words, you can’t forget the old ones. Sometimes this can seem impossible but not if you learn a few ways to “trick” your brain into holding on to those unfamiliar sounds.

Brain Trick 1:
​Tell a Story

Learn new vocabulary by creating a story. Our brains like to be entertained. It is very difficult to learn anything when you are bored because your mind begins to wander off and not really focus on what you want it to learn. Stories are fun and keep your brain right where you want it.


Last semester I took my students to a park on the last day of class. I always love to give them the chance to be my teacher so when we suddenly became surrounded by a swarm of dragonflies I asked them how to say dragonfly in Japanese. They firmly and confidently told me “Tombow”. I could feel the word slipping away from me just seconds later so I decided to hold on to it by creating a story. I pulled the word apart into “Tom” and “bow”. Then I thought of my cousin Tom and I imagined myself giving him a gift with a giant bow on top. He loved the bow so much that he didn’t even open the present, he just put the bow on top of his head. I laughed because he looked like a dragonfly and I imagined him flying off into the distance, the sun glinting on his wings.


This seems like a lot of effort to put into learning a word. Wouldn’t it be easier just to look at it and repeat it to myself a few times? Well, to put it simply, no. To learn, you must give whatever it is you are trying to learn your full attention. Creating a story for your word requires that you focus on the word and it gives you a path to find the sounds when you want them. If I remember my cousin Tom looking like a dragonfly, that gives me a place to start and then I can work my way back to the sounds that create the word.   

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Brain Trick 2:
Put your Words into a Place

Find a location for your word. We have several different kinds of memory and the one that retains information the easiest is called episodic. Episodic memory is the why you remember what you ate for breakfast this morning even though you didn’t write it down and memorize it. It is the reason you remember where you went for your last vacation and who you went with. You can use this to your advantage when memorizing things like vocabulary or how to spell that new vocabulary word.


My daughter was having trouble spelling words correctly, especially words that contain the same sounds but are spelled differently. Read and seed for example both have a long E sound.

​We came up with 2 different locations to put those words, the Sea of EA and the EE Tree. We drew an island with a tree on it and cut out lots of leaves and fish. Whenever we came across a word with either of those spellings, my daughter wrote it down on either a leaf or a fish and then glued it on to the appropriate place. We then used story telling to cement it in. I asked her why read was in the sea and she said “there was a man who wanted to read but some people were fighting next to him and he couldn’t concentrate so he jumped into the sea with his book to read in peace.


This has made spelling much more fun and all she has to do is remember where the words are to remember how they are spelled. We have since added an IE thief who steals words like field and belief as well as a Kingdom of K and the Cliffs of C.   

​Brain Trick 3:
Spaced Repetition 

Your brain needs time to learn. Two other kinds of memory are short and long term memory. If we don’t forget something immediately, it goes into short term memory, kind of a limbo area in which the brain decides if it wants to hold on to that particular piece of information or discard it. One of the ways the brain decides what to do with the information is if it is accessed or not.

If you want to keep something, you need to recall it, not right after you are exposed to it but a little while later and then again a little while after that. This means that when it comes to vocabulary, you should “learn” it and then take a short break (a couple of minutes). After a couple of minutes you should attempt to recall it, not just look at it. This is where flash cards, either physical or electronic come in.

You should look either at an image or at the definition of the word and try to think of the word without looking. Only after you try to recall it, should you allow yourself to look. The learning takes place in the attempt to recall, not in the exposure to the word. If you can’t recall a word, “learn” it again and start the process over. Give yourself an ever widening gap of time between recall attempts and after several weeks the words you are studying will become “yours”.


I use this “trick” with my daughter after we put her new spelling words either in the tree or in the sea. I will ask her several times to tell me where her new words are and why they are there. Without revisiting those words, places and stories several times, they would be lost and we would have to start all over again.

Brain Trick 4:
Visual Imagery 

Long before we learned how to read, our brains were adept at seeing visual images and assigning names to them. It is easier for our brains to remember a picture of something than a written description so when you are creating your flash cards or attempting to learn new words in other ways, you will have an easier time remembering and using a word if you have a visual image to go with it.

I recommend drawing a picture instead of writing either a translation or a definition of the word on a flash cared. When you are drawing you are asking your brain to focus on and imagine the word in a way that is easier for it to access later, it will also help you to use the word more fluently in the future as your association with the word is direct rather than filtered through several other layers of language.

​It may seem counterintuitive but the more complicated and indirect the connection between the image you draw and the word, the easier it is to remember because the brain is forced to put more effort into making connections and therefor the connection becomes stronger.


Memorizing words does not have to be drudgery if you approach the task in brain-friendly ways. The more you work with your brain, instead of against it, the more your brain will reward you with better and faster recall. What are some ways you have found to memorize vocabulary? Do you have any tricks or tips you can share with us?