Ten minutes a day: how to remember the words you learn

You met the word reluctant on Monday. You looked it up, wrote it in your notebook and read the page again on Wednesday. On Saturday, a friend asks how you feel about moving house. The perfect word is right there. You can almost see it. But it won’t come out.

That isn’t a memory problem. It’s a method problem. Rereading makes words look familiar, and looking familiar isn’t the same as being ready to use. The fix is simple, and it takes ten minutes a day.

Why words slip away

• We forget fastest at the start. Hermann Ebbinghaus first measured the forgetting curve in the 1880s. In 2015, two researchers repeated his experiment: one of them learned 69 lists of nonsense syllables over about 70 hours. The result looked very like the original. Memory drops quickly at first, then more slowly (Murre & Dros, 2015). Nonsense syllables aren’t real words, but the shape of that curve is why your first review should come soon.
• Remembering beats rereading. In a well-known experiment, students learned 40 Swahili–English word pairs. Once they could recall a word, some kept testing themselves on it. Others stopped testing it, even if they kept reading it. A week later, the first groups remembered about 80% of the words, and the others only about a third. At the end of the learning session, students in every group had predicted they would remember about half (Karpicke & Roediger, 2008). The feeling of “I know this” is not a reliable guide.
• Spreading reviews out pays off. Over nine years, four people learned 300 foreign-language word pairs. Thirteen review sessions 56 days apart gave about the same long-term memory as 26 sessions 14 days apart (Bahrick et al., 1993). Half the sessions, same result.

A major review of ten popular study techniques agrees. Only two were rated “high utility”: practice testing and spreading study out over time. Rereading and highlighting were rated low (Dunlosky et al., 2013). Flashcards let you do both. The vocabulary researcher Paul Nation describes deliberate learning with word cards as efficient and effective, as long as you keep meeting each word until it is thoroughly learned (Nation, 2022).

The 10-minute plan

Open Flashcards in the free iGreener Practice Room.

Minutes 1–5: review what’s due. Pick a deck. Read the front, which is a short definition or a situation, and say the English word out loud before you press Flip. Then mark it honestly. Press Got it only if the word came quickly and correctly. Not yet isn’t failure. It just means the card needs another visit.

Minutes 6–8: add three to five new cards. Choose words you met this week: in class, in a video, on a menu. Use Add your own card. On the front, write a definition or a situation. On the back, write the word inside a natural phrase: make a decision, heavy traffic, catch a cold. Your cards go into the deck called My cards.

Minutes 9–10: use them. Say or write two or three sentences about your own life with today’s words. I finally made a decision about my course. The traffic was really heavy this morning.

One rule keeps the habit going: if your due cards take longer than five minutes, skip new cards that day.

How the boxes work

Every card lives in a box. When you press Got it, the card moves up a box and comes back after a longer gap: 1 day, then 2, 4, 8 and 16 days. When you press Not yet, it drops back to box 1 and reappears a few cards later in the same session. You only see cards that are due, up to 25 at a time, so your daily list stays short.

Why do the gaps grow? A study of more than 1,350 adults found that the best gap depends on how long you want to remember (Cepeda et al., 2008). For a test in a week, the best gap between study and review was about one to three days. To remember for a year, it was around three to four weeks. Gaps that were too long cost much less than gaps that were too short. So the boxes start short while a word is new, and grow as it settles.

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Common mistakes

• Flipping too soon. The effort of remembering is what makes a memory stronger. If you peek, you skip the part that works.
• Pressing “Got it” to be kind to yourself. The card then disappears for days while you still don’t really know it.
• Dropping words once you know them. Remember the Swahili study: when students stopped testing a word, recall fell from about 80% to about a third. Let known cards come back. They’ll appear less and less often.
• Adding thirty words on a good day. Next week, they’ll all be due at once. Small and steady wins.
• Cramming on Sunday. One long session feels productive, but the research backs spreading the same work across the week.
• Learning lonely words. Decision on its own is hard to use. Make a decision is ready for your next conversation.

Ten minutes is enough

Ten minutes is small enough to fit into your busiest day. That’s the point. To follow spoken English with only about one unknown word in fifty, Nation estimates you need 6,000–7,000 word families (Nation, 2006). Nobody learns that many in a month. But a few words a day, reviewed at the right moment, really do add up.

Open the Practice Room and finish today’s cards before you close this page. And if you’re not sure which level or class is right for you, take the placement test.

Sources

• Murre, J. M. J., & Dros, J. (2015). Replication and analysis of Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve. PLOS ONE, 10(7), e0120644.
• Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger, H. L. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 319(5865), 966–968.
• Bahrick, H. P., Bahrick, L. E., Bahrick, A. S., & Bahrick, P. E. (1993). Maintenance of foreign language vocabulary and the spacing effect. Psychological Science, 4(5).
• Cepeda, N. J., Vul, E., Rohrer, D., Wixted, J. T., & Pashler, H. (2008). Spacing effects in learning: A temporal ridgeline of optimal retention. Psychological Science, 19(11), 1095–1102.
• Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.
• Nation, I. S. P. (2022). Deliberate vocabulary learning from word cards. In Learning Vocabulary in Another Language (pp. 397–432). Cambridge University Press.
• Nation, I. S. P. (2006). How large a vocabulary is needed for reading and listening? The Canadian Modern Language Review, 63(1), 59–82.

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