How to learn vocabulary for a language class

By Planr.ai · 15 September 2026 · 6 min read

Vocabulary is the one part of a language course that is pure memory, which makes it the part where method matters most. Most people use the method that works for 30 words and breaks at 300.

The list-and-cover method has a ceiling

Writing the words in two columns, covering one side and going down the list works, briefly. It breaks for two reasons. First, you learn the order rather than the words, so you recall casa because it follows coche, and the test does not keep your order. Second, you only ever practise the easy direction.

The fix for the first is to shuffle: cards you can physically reorder, or a list you test from the bottom up on alternate days. The fix for the second is below, and it is worth more.

Test in the direction the exam asks for

Seeing the Spanish word and recalling the English is recognition, and it is easy. Seeing the English and producing the Spanish — with the right gender, the right spelling, the right accent — is production, and it is what writing and speaking tasks actually require.

Production is two to three times harder, so a vocabulary session that only does recognition can leave you feeling fluent and scoring badly. Test the hard direction first while you are fresh, and use recognition only as a warm-up for a list you have not seen in weeks.

Write the word out rather than saying it when spelling is marked. Accents and double letters vanish the moment you only rehearse sound.
Learn nouns with their article — la mano, not mano — because gender is marked and the article is the cheapest way to store it.
Learn verbs with a preposition and an example: depender de, followed by a five-word sentence you made up.

Sentences beat single words

A word learned alone is a word you can translate. A word learned inside a short sentence is a word you can use, and it carries its grammar with it. Six words in a sentence you wrote yourself is a better five minutes than twelve words in a column.

Make the sentences about your own life — what you did at the weekend, what is in your bag, an argument you had with your brother. Personal sentences are recalled faster than textbook ones, and they double as speaking-exam preparation, because those are the topics speaking exams ask about.

Twenty a day, not two hundred a fortnight

Twenty new words a day, reviewed with the spacing that everything else in memory research supports — same day, two days later, a week later — is roughly ten minutes of work and about 100 words a school week. Two hundred words in one Sunday session is the same total and almost none of it survives to Friday.

The daily version also fails gracefully. Miss a day and you have lost twenty words. Miss the Sunday and you have lost the week.

Words that refuse to stick

Every list has four or five words that will not go in. Do not keep hammering them with the same method — attach something to them instead.

A sound-alike image works surprisingly well: the French word for carpet, tapis, sounds like tap-ee, so picture a tap dripping onto a carpet. It feels childish and it is the most reliable trick available for a stubborn word. Alternatively, find the word in a song lyric, a meme, or a sentence about someone you know, and the association does the holding.

For a word that keeps blanking under pressure, learn a whole phrase containing it. Phrases are recalled as single units, and the word comes along with the rest.

What this does not fix

Vocabulary is not the same as comprehension. Knowing 500 words and no grammar produces a student who understands every word of a paragraph and cannot say what happened in it, because the tense was conditional and the pronoun was the object.

Split your time. If you are strong on words and weak on listening, the problem is speed of processing, not knowledge, and it needs listening practice at a slightly uncomfortable speed rather than another word list.

Planr will turn a vocabulary list or a photo of the textbook page into a deck in about a minute, and Learn mode drills the production direction by default. The twenty a day still has to be you.