Using “Cramming” To Better Study Your Lists
“Get excited about your problems. Don’t hope to get to a place where you have no problems. Create higher quality problems!” - Tony Robbins
One thing that’s tough about learning vocab words is that they’re so abstract. You don’t have anything you can really associate them with in your brain, meaning you have to create whole new spaces to store them (and the connectors are weak). Ideally, everything you learn should be something you kind of already have in your brain (that’s how most of TextFugu is laid out). With vocab, though, this is really hard to do.
One little trick that helps to alleviate this (and you’ll also see it on TextFugu, but you should do this on your own) is to cram a few words (as if you were studying for a test last minute) right before studying them on Anki. So, before you study a list of say ten words, you’ll want to try to force yourself to learn 3 of those words and get them into your short term memory. Then, when they show up in Anki, you’ll already kind of have them in your head. That way, these three words will get into your long term memory a lot more quickly. The other seven words may cause trouble, but you can keep repeating this pattern between deck study sessions and eventually you’ll learn all of them.
A little will go a long way, as long as you’re consistent.
With the next vocab list you learn (actually, with all vocab lists, if you can) try this technique out. It’s simple, it takes only a minute or two before you study each list, and will increase your learning rate by quite a bit!