Memorized English fades. Written English stays.

I bought five vocabulary books.

All five stopped around page 200. I spent about three seconds on each line — "Frequent — happens often" — and forgot it the moment I turned the page. I'd read somewhere that you need to repeat a word about seven times for it to stick. The problem was that I'd meet fifty new words before I could repeat any of them seven times.

The issue wasn't effort. The act of "memorizing" itself is a weak learning activity — that became clearer with every book I gave up on.

What cognitive psychology says

Hulstijn and Laufer's Involvement Load Hypothesis (2001) argues that depth of vocabulary learning is determined by three factors at the moment of encounter — Need, Search, and Evaluation.

Memorizing from a list scores low on all three. There's no urgency to know this word for the next sentence to make sense. So next week, it's gone.

A word you look up because you got stuck while writing your diary is different. "Today's overtime really dragged on — how do I say 'overtime' in English?" Need is at its peak. You compare working late and overtime — that's Search and Evaluation happening together. Same word, same five seconds, very different depth.

Productive vs Receptive

Linguists distinguish between receptive vocabulary (words you recognize when you hear or read them) and productive vocabulary (words you can produce yourself). Across most learners, productive vocabulary tends to be about one-third the size of receptive vocabulary (Laufer, 1998).

In other words, most of the words we "think we know" we can't actually use. Writing is the act of moving words from the receptive shelf to the productive one.

Memorizing is shelving the book. Writing is pulling it down and reading it.

A year later, the word you've used once in a sentence and the word you only memorized live very different lives.

Retrieval Practice

Roediger and Karpicke's research on the testing effect takes this one step further. Pulling something out of memory is two to three times more effective than re-reading it.

A daily diary is daily retrieval practice. "How was today? → How do I say that in English?" Two steps that comb through your memory, and that combing is what makes the memory hold.

So

Write one line today. If you get stuck on a phrase, look it up. A year from now, that one line will have left more behind than five vocabulary books.

Start with Three Lines →