Imagine you’re trying to learn Chinese and your teacher introduces you to the character, 日, meaning “sun.” It makes no sense to you, right?. How does 日 look like the sun?!

After class, you ask a Chinese friend for help and they explain the character by drawing some pictures:

And now you get it! Your friend turned a seemingly meaningless symbol into a memorable character! So, next time you encounter a new character, you’ll want to go back to ask this friend to “do their magic” again.

Similarly, as tutors, every new word is a chance to unravel fascinating insights that’ll help students remember it, and the better we get at this, the more our students will want to learn with us again. 

So let’s go over some techniques that’ll allow us to make 90% of new vocabulary words more memorable!

Word Parts

A good way to help students remember a new word is to point out parts of the words they already know.

Let’s say the word “research” appears in a lesson. By the time a student learns the word “research,” they usually already know the word “search,” so you can point out that “research” includes the word “search” and the prefix “re-” (which means “to do again”). 

When you’re researching something, you might search for it again and again on Google; hence, research!

While this explanation may seem obvious to us, this is (un)fortunately not the case with most students. After all, word parts usually aren’t mentioned in dictionary definitions. For example, here is our definition of “research”:

And here is how we define “illegally” (notice the word “legal” is not mentioned at all):

So don’t be surprised if your student’s face lights up when you point out the connections between “research” and “search,” “illegal” and “legal,” and so on and so forth.

Just make sure to consider whether students will know the word part you’re pointing out. For example, students usually learn the word “holiday” as beginners. The word “holiday” includes the words “holy” and “day.” However, a beginner is unlikely to know the word “holy,” so introducing it as part of the word “holiday” here will be confusing.

Word Parts (Cheat Version)

Not all words can be neatly broken down into parts that reflect their history, so sometimes we have to “cheat” a bit to make them memorable. 

Let’s say the word “mold” appears in a reading. By the time a student encounters “mold,” they should have already mastered “old,” so you can help them remember this new word with a sentence like, “old things grow mold.” The two words aren’t actually related but making this connection can still help students memorize the word “mold” faster.

Let’s try another one: “hesitate.” We can break this word into “he,” “sit,” and “ate” and have students imagine a man who can’t decide whether to sit or to eat (past tense: ate).

Something (aside from your imagination) that you can refer to for help is the Mnemonic Dictionary, where learners share their mnemonics for big words. For example, there is an entry for the word “obsequious.” One person suggests relying on the second syllable, which sounds like “seek” as a memory aid: when you seek help, you’re willing to be obsequious.

Comparison

You can also make a word easier-to-remember by comparing it to similar-looking words the student already knows.

For example, by the time a student encounters the word “delirious,” they probably already know “delicious.” So you can encourage them to imagine someone going delirious, because they can’t eat their favorite delicious food.

Or let’s say the word “sweat” appears on a vocabulary list. You can help them remember it by pointing out that the word “swim,” which your student probably already knows, also starts with “sw-.” Your student can imagine someone swimming in sweat.

And when your student learns the word “desert” and confuses it with “dessert,” you can tell them that dessert has two S’s, because you always want seconds!

Keep in mind that you don’t need to come up with all these comparisons all by yourself. You can ask your student if certain new words remind them of words they already know. For instance, if your student says that “sweat” reminds them of “sweet.” you can reply, “but sweat is not sweet at all, right?!” 

📌 Takeaways

We went over a few ways to help students connect new words to old words, allowing the new ones to better “stick” in their memory: 

Next time you see a vocabulary list, take a minute to think about which words you can apply these tricks to! Here is one from this Daily News article if you want to practice right now:

Here are a few that I thought of: 

• “captivity” is related to “capture” 
• “breeding” is related to “brother”
• “species” is like “special” (each species is different and special)
• “Wild” sounds like “wide.” (I imagine a wide pasture or plain with tigers in it.)

To see how to explain “raise,” check out this blog post.