The basics of learning a language

1. Words come first

Without words you get nowhere. You can guess your way past a verb ending you don’t know, but not past a word you have never seen. In a study of people reading texts in a foreign language, how much they understood followed closely how many of the words they knew. The more words they knew, the more they understood.

It takes a lot of words. One widely cited estimate is that you need 8,000 to 9,000 word families to read a novel or a newspaper in English without help, and 6,000 to 7,000 to follow spoken English. A word family is a base word with its forms, like help, helps and helpful. Nobody gets there in a semester, but it explains why the vocabulary homework comes back every week. Each list is one piece of the build.

2. Pull the words out of memory

Reading through a word list feels efficient, but what makes words stick is trying to remember them. Cover the answer, say or write what you think it is, then check.

In a well-known experiment, college students learned vocabulary in Swahili. Those who kept quizzing themselves on every word remembered about 80 percent a week later. Those who stopped quizzing themselves on a word as soon as they got it right once remembered about a third, even though they read the words just as many times. So keep quizzing yourself on the words you already got right.

3. Spread out your practice

Ten minutes a day for four days beats forty minutes in one evening. A review of several hundred experiments shows that what you practice on several occasions stays with you longer than what you practice for the same time in one go.

For a language, that also means old words need to come back. Take out last month’s word lists now and then and quiz yourself on them, or they fade. You build a language over several years, and the words from last fall should still be there in the spring.

4. Read and listen a lot

Word lists give you the words. Reading and listening show you how they are used, and you meet them again and again. You need that. In one study, learners who had met a new word ten times in different sentences knew clearly more about it than those who had met it once or three times.

Pick something easy enough that you will keep going: an easy reader, a show with subtitles in the new language, songs or a podcast for beginners. A summary of many studies shows that people who read a lot of easy text in the new language become, on average, better readers than those who don’t.

5. Use the words

Knowing a word when you see it is easier than coming up with it yourself. In an experiment with French vocabulary, people did best in the direction they had practiced. Those who had practiced from their own language to the new one did best when they had to produce the word themselves.

• Practice in both directions, and mostly from your own language to the new one.
• Say the words out loud. Words you say out loud are remembered better than words you only read silently, and you practice the pronunciation along the way.
• Make your own sentences. Write or say a sentence with each new word, ideally about something in your own life.

A week that works

Here is what the basics can look like in an ordinary school week:

• Monday: go through the week’s words and quiz yourself once.
• Tuesday to Thursday: quiz yourself for 5–10 minutes a day, in both directions, and write the answers.
• Sometime during the week: read or listen to something in the language for fifteen minutes, and do a round of older words.
• The evening before the test: one last round of the whole list.

More on studying the words themselves is in How to study vocabulary.

Practice the words with Learn It

Learn It is a free iPhone and iPad app with no ads that quizzes you on vocabulary and homework questions. You type in the week’s words and practice with Spelling, Multiple choice or Flashcards. Swap sides flips the quiz so you practice the other direction, and after each round you can practice just the ones you missed. The app handles the quizzing. The reading, the listening and the conversations you have to find elsewhere.

There are also 100+ ready-made quizzes in several languages, such as Animals in Spanish, Food and drink in Spanish and Family in German.