A METHOD TO MEMORIZE WORDS AND INCREASE YOUR VOCABULARY

If you want to increase the range of your speaking skills, you also need to increase your vocabulary. If you know the grammar but not the vocabulary, you can’t speak. Paradoxically enough, though, if you know the vocabulary but not the grammar, you can communicate—poorly, but you can. Bottom line, increasing your vocabulary range is of absolute importance.

Initially you want to aim for words that have a practical usage, so whatever you can use in a restaurant, train station, airport, police precinct, hospital, bar, cafè, etc. Then, as your speaking skills increase, you want to extend your vocabulary range to more abstract words, which you will need if you want to discuss art, philosophy, history, politics, economics, and so on.

But how to memorize and remember words?

Here’s a quick and effective method you can use.

Make sure you have a list of words that look something like this:

THE WEATHER FORECAST	LE PREVISIONI DEL TEMPO
Mist	Foschia
Cold	Freddo
Lightning	Fulmine
To freeze	Gelare
Ice	Ghiaccio
Hailstorm	Grandinata
Hail	Grandine
Pollution	Inquinamento
Moon	Luna
Fog	Nebbia
Snow	Neve
To snow	Nevicare
Flurries	Nevischio
Cloud	Nuvola
Rain	Pioggia
To rain	Piovere
To drizzle	Piovigginare
Sun	Sole
Star	Stella
Temperature	Temperatura.

You will notice all these words belong in the same vocabulary category: weather. At some point—let’s say when you move up to an intermediate level—you want to study lists of words that have something in common and that refer to the same field—photography, cooking, grocery shopping, music, the internet, etc. This will make them sink in more easily, and it’s going to be of great help for the second step in memorization that I’m going to describe later. But let’s not jump the gun.

First, you need to memorize them. Read the word in your language aloud first, then read aloud its corresponding term in Italian. If you have a list of twenty words like in the table above, focus on ten words first if twenty is too much. After reading through two or three times, cover the words in Italian with a sheet of paper or a book. Go back to the top, read aloud the word in your native language and then say aloud its corresponding word in Italian. Do that for the first ten words. When you get to the end of the ten words—or twenty, or whatever you’re comfortable with—go back to the top of the list and do it again. After doing it three or four times, you’ll see you’re not as slow and hesitant anymore. At this point, you’re done for the day. Take it back tomorrow and go again, same thing. You'll have lapses, as it is normal, so give yourself some slack. Do it two or three more times. Then let it rest until next day. When you take it back the next day, you don’t want to read and say the words in the order you have them in the list. You want to skip randomly and quickly from one word to the other. Break the order, break the habit. This is an added layer of difficulty, so expect more lapses. Do this for a day or two for a few minutes. When you’ve gotten rid of all hesitancy and lapses, add ten more words from the same list and do exactly as you did for the first ten words. Then, once you got the second ten words, you do the hopping randomly from word to word with all of the words in the list. Do it for a couple of days a few minutes each time.

This is how you memorize words, but you’re not done yet. Now you need to make sure you won’t forget the words it took you days and effort to learn. So here's step two of the process.

You need to expose yourself to the words you've memorized, meaning you need to have them come to you from outside. “How do I do it?” you might ask, “I don’t live in Italy.” True that. Fortunately, we have resources. You can use YouTube or any other video platform to watch videos where you know they are going to use that same vocabulary you just learned. For example, if you learned sixty words on architecture, you can spend a week watching videos and documentaries on architecture.

Remember, hearing from someone else’s voice and recognizing the words you just memorized is the best way to remember them. You’re basically doing to your brain what ranchers do when they brand cattle.

So shove away pen and paper and get to work. It’ll pay off, I promise you.

Feel free to leave a comment if you have any doubts or concerns, and I’ll be happy to help you address them.

And this is The JP Method