How often do you forget words as you learn them?

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I’m just wondering if i’m forgetting stuff way more than most people, because i’m so bad at remembering anything new. I currently have it set to learn 10 words at a time, but when I learn new words, I almost never remember everything and get 100% accuracy. It sometimes happens, but rarely. Most of the time I only remember 6 or 7 of the words, but sometimes I could actually somehow get up to 9 out of 10 wrong, therefore only “planting” just 1 new word. When it comes to reviews I do much better, averaging around 80% correct… but on occasion even that can dip down to 50%. (if i’m reviewing a course i’ve completed some time ago, but kept up reviews, then I can get 100% on them, unless I make a typo)

So how do I compare against everyone else? Anyone else as bad as I am at remembering stuff?

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all you have to do is keep on learning the words! it’s tedious, but you will get their eventually!

ApolloNexus

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You’re the exact opposite of me … my short term memory is pretty good so I can easily plant 20 words at a time (and sometimes up to 50 on an easy course) and get almost all of them right (except the ones with somewhat ambiguous meanings) the first time through but when it comes to reviews - especially on courses that I’ve done a while ago - I’m horrible and many times end up down in the 20-30% range. A lot of this for me is that I do many strict typing courses and I miss little stuff but still it’s a bit frustrating.

I think I’d prefer your memory type … once you’ve got it, it sticks around versus my head. Just keep going and you’ll master what you’re learning.

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It depends.
If I can stick that learning item to something that is already in my memory, I can remember it easily, otherwise it’s hard. But you can always use some of the learning methods.

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I’ve found that learning things that are somewhat similar to words I already know is much easier than learning words that have no connection.

For example, the Turkish, “camyon, pantalon, rezervasyon, televizyon” are very close to the Spanish, “camión, pantalón, reservasión, televisión,” so they are very easy to remember. But “havuç, henüz, karanlık” are nothing like the words I know in other languages: “carrot, yet, darkness,” “zanahoria, aún, oscuridad” “Karrote, schon, Dunkelheit.” (English, Spanish, German). It took more effort to learn them.

I discovered that saying mems to myself every time I answer a question makes learning new words more effective. Perhaps it could work for you, too?

Here’s what it looks like: For all words that I don’t already know, or aren’t closely related to words I know, I choose or create a mem. Every time I answer a question during the planting session, I say the mem to myself, either out loud, whispering, or clearly in my mind.

Lately, I’ve been learning Romanian, so here are a few of my recently created mems:

  • soare : sun - The sun is SOARing across the sky.
  • prieten : friend - I PRETENd she’s my friend.
  • ziua : day - Any day that I SEE U After work is a good day.
  • iar : and, while - And while WE ARE thinking…
  • noi citem : we read - Before we can CITE HIM, we read his books.

So, as I’m planting, I’m saying to myself as I answer each question:

The sun is soaring across the sky, any day I see you after work, and while we are thinking, I pretend she’s my friend, we read his books in order to cite him, day I see you after work, we read to cite him, sun is soaring, she’s my pretend friend, my friend is pretend… and so on.

Notice that I don’t always say the whole mem. The idea is to reinforce the connection between sun and soare, prieten and friend, ziua and day, etc. The other words in the mem are simply a path for making those connections.

It took a while to learn how to make good mems, so be patient with yourself. An effective mem is memorable, often funny or odd, usually short, and works for YOU. If adding an image to your mem makes it stick in your mind better, use it! You’ll know your mems are working if you remember more easily, and you’ll know you’ve created a dud if you still can’t remember the word. (I’ve created plenty of duds!)

I see that you’re learning Japanese. I have almost no experience with languages that use symbols or non-Latin alphabets. You may need mems that are in a completely different style than the examples I gave above. The important thing is to find what works for you.

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jecht, I don’t know if this can “console” you, but - I said this many times in here - even for learning items that ressemble/build upon one’s previous experience one needs at least 15-20 occurences of a learning event which focuses on the same learning item.

this bit of knowledge seems so popular, that even these little booklets called “Mandarin Companion” use this finding in their own ads (“research has taught us that learners need to “encounter” a word 10-30 times before truly learning it, and often many more times for particularly complicated or abstract words…”)

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I’m not sure if this is helping, but maybe it does. I sure hope it does.

In my experience, everything depends on what and how you are learning. And by that I mostly mean the structure of the course you are working on.

When I’m using just any course, thematic lists, sometimes I have trouble remembering things and sometimes it goes all right, it depends mostly on how tired I am, how strange the words are, and a lot of other factors which others have already mentioned. But the method which works best for me is a bit different. See, I don’t really like mems. They just don’t establish a strong connection for me. Instead I need some other kind of device to connect words and meanings.

That’s why Memrise is not my primary/only source of learning but a very important complementary part of the process. I’m learning the language, so I’m reading texts (either in a language book or a short story, a novel, an article, anything we are working with in school, anything I found online or in the library or really, anything I’m interested in.) First I only read it to have a basic idea what the text/story is about. Then I read again with a pencil in hand, underlining the words and phrases which I don’t know, or which feel strange for some reason or which use a word in a new or unfamiliar meaning. Then I build a new level of those underlined phrases on my own course, definitely not using a wiki, but rather figuring out and researching their exact meanings, looking it up in several dictionaries (monolingual and bilingual), maybe checking out how the word is used in sentences, finding synonyms if necessary. Just getting familiar with it. Then I can add a well thought-out entry to my course database. (And while I’m doing that, I can also check out the existing similar entries, which reminds me of those ones as well.) Some people swear by adding audio too, I for one find that annoying, it just distracts me from learning, but that might be a personal preference.

So when I’m learning the word/phrase, usually a few days after creating the level, it is already familiar, because I’ve read it a few times, I’ve spent some time with it, I remember the context it was used in originally. Then I go through the needed six repetitions when planting, and the first watering usually the same evening, and the second the next morning. By that time I feel like the word is, if not exactly my friend, still an acquaintance I’ve met numerous times. I can definitely recall knowing it from somewhere.

(Another plus with the own course is, if I find a mistake, if I learn something new about a word, if I find that my clue is misleading, I can always correct it. Another great thing is, that I have a log of all the words I’ve encountered. This also gives an impression about their stylistic value based on which types of texts they occur. I still use other people’s courses though, their main value being that it’s another language pairing which often showcases a new nuance in a given word, and also that it was someone else doing the thinking which I can contrast with my findings.)

I know from experience that if I want to score above 90% on a word test in school I need at least four days, but preferably a week to spend with those words. There are a few in my class who manage the same feat by cramming only the night before, but I don’t know how much they remember a week later.

It still happens of course that I forget something (usually after the longer resting periods, when I haven’t seen the word in a while), but then when I see the right answer, I immediately recall not only the word itself, but also the text it is coming from and a bunch of associations, maybe even the emotions I had when reading the story. So while this is a very slow process, much slower than using someone else’s course, but I feel it is worth the time and the effort, and it pays of in efficiency.

That’s something I keep recommending to people (also in school, I tell them not to use my course and build their own instead, not that they listen) especially if you have trouble remembering after such sporadic exposure. So building your own course based on your own learning and own experiences might be something to look into. And if you feel too self-conscious for it, you can have your course private or unlisted, only for your, it doesn’t have to be public.

So whatever you decide, good luck with your studies - and keep in mind that training your memory every day makes it actually stronger, so even just 15-20 minutes memrise-ing a day increases your capacity for new info radically.

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Hello @jecht. It varies with me and it does depend on the course one is doing (as others have said). If I’m struggling from the get-go, I look for a good Mem to help me. If there isn’t one there I create one. Keep forging ahead anyway. I wouldn’t wait till you were perfect with the words already learned before learning more. Best wishes.

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I forget words all the time, but I do the reviews and get better. A few things that have helped me.

  1. Don’t try to learn new words or practice when you are tired.
  2. Do not try to do do much at once. I have memrise prime and I use the counters to
    limit my time and learning events covered. You want to figure out what is a sustainable
    rate so you do not get mentally overloaded and become burned out.
  3. I like to do 20 word lists for new words. I usually get between 12-15 correct. I do not try to add
    words if my review load becomes too high. Anything that does not pass just gets covered the next time.
  4. In addition to practicing on memrise, I also read, learn songs, watch youtube videos and watch english movies with the foreign language subtitles turned on.
  5. Be patient and learn to accept that you will forget words.
1 Like
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oh, it happens to me too… learning ten words and missing lots of them during first recap
and some wordx i keep doing wrong
and sometimes there is a word i knew, andi start doing it wrong, like 九