How many words can you learn per day or week? Did you say 900?!

I bet you ask yourself this question when you are at an early stage of learning a language. Actually, you are wondering how long it will take you to learn A LANGUAGE. At least that is what I mean when asking myself these sorts of questions. You see, I am totally against the ‘learn-five-words-a-day’ scheme. Why? Just imagine: yesterday you had a headache and failed to learn these five.

Today you are meeting with friends and are going to be back home drunk and late. Tomorrow you will be suffering from a hangover. You have failed this every daily routine for three days in a row. And the day after tomorrow you will be learning in a hurry and that often means ineffectively.

And if you skipped the whole week?

I was lucky enough to do it lots and lots of times.

And again, if you say yourself ‘I HAVE TO learn 5 words a day’ or ‘I MUST learn one grammar rule a week’ you are compelling yourself into doing it. You force yourself like you have to do it against your own free will. And is that really so? I doubt. It’s a language, not a diet, the words ‘have to’ and ‘must’ are out of place!

But still, back at school I was a complete fan of this scheme. Only I didn’t go with five words a day. It was 900 words per week. I’m not kidding, that was it. NINE HUNDRED WORDS. So my answer to the question ‘How many words can you learn per day or week?’ was 30 and 900 respectively. How could that be possible?! – I hear your disbelief. It was possible because I followed some rules. Now I am sharing them with you.

1. First and foremost. I told myself that it’s possible. I said it and I meant it. I never abandoned this belief.

2. Secondly I told myself that the aim of doing this was to remember the words WELL. So I thought up different real-life examples and situations where I could use one of the new words. Usually these used to be examples ending with exclamation marks (and rude words).

3. I made sure to include enough words in the list that sounded similar to Russian.

4. I put words in the list that I came across in my favourite songs (Nirvana, Metallica, Marilyn Manson, The Garbage) and in school books.

5. I put some words in the list whose meanings I could recall after a couple of minutes. So they were not totally new.

6. I learnt the words not only from top to bottom, but randomly as well.

7. Sure, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to keep this pace for long, so I just told myself that it was a kind of finishing spurt and all I needed was to just be patient for… a month. So I spent every single spare minute learning, repeating and thinking up examples.

A month appeared to be too much. I kept up that pace for three weeks.

Marilyn Manson and Nirvana lirycs helped me a great deal in my studies.

Rules number 1, 4 and 7 were of the most help to me.

Of course, some words escaped my memory soon enough. But that was still a big game and believe it or not I picked up a huge part of my vocabulary during these three weeks. It’s embedded so deep into my memory because I gave it all my intellectual force and energy.

It can work for anyone. The only thing I’d like to add is that it’s probably not going to work when you are just starting to learn a language. It’s good when you are intermediate or higher. Because you’ll have enough supporting vocabulary to be able to wander about the house having imaginary conversations with your new word.

How do you learn new words and works for you? What scheme do you follow? And how many words can YOU learn per day or week? Please share with us in the comments section!