Language Learning: The Truth About Vocabulary Part IV

List Learning
List learning is the method of choice for teachers across the globe because it goes hand in hand with the translation method, so immediately you should be questioning its effectiveness. What list learning is effective at is getting vocabulary into your head fast. This is a highly inefficient method because what you actually end up learning is the list, not what the words actually are.
Think about the alphabet. You can say it from a-z but what if I ask you which letter is the 8th or the 21st? You probably have to count on your fingers starting with ‘a’. Or if I ask you ‘what’s the letter before ‘q’?’ or ‘the letter after ‘g’?’ You probably have to say a ‘chunk’ of the alphabet before you can tell me. This means that when you learn with a list, you’re using other words to find the word you want, making you reliant on the list to help you remember. So the time when list learning is most useful is when you have a lot of information and a short amount of time to learn it - and enough time to unpack the information from the list. Basically, list learning is best for exams. There are numerous ways to learn a list, one of the best is the ‘link method’, a quick google search will help you find out how this works.
Another time you need to put a lot of information into your head fast is at the beginning of your language learning, when you need to start practising as soon as possible. List learning can provide a solid springboard that makes you independent from writing things down/a teacher and it enables you to say your first words, phrases and even have your first conversations. When you’re starting out practise is much more important than accuracy, so it doesn’t matter that when you’re learning a list you’re not learning the words properly.
The best kind of vocabulary to learn through a list are the most common words, because you will encounter them more frequently, making it easier to detach them from the list. Another way to make list learning more useful is to learn words that are already in lists your head – the colours of the rainbow for example, or numbers. Numbers in particular are very easily learned through list learning. You encounter them all the time in real life, you can use them to have countless conversations and their meaning is perhaps the most universal across all languages.

Learning by Association
List learning, collocation and pronunciation all work in a similar way. They help you to associate ‘meaning’ with something else. When that something else is encountered (heard, read, said) the meaning returns and you remember and hopefully understand. Your memory and understanding is reinforced the more you hear, read or say a word.
List learning is by far the most impractical method, partly because it is inevitably used hand in hand with the translation method and partly because in order to access the meaning or remember it, you need to remember the order of the list.
By practising the pronunciation you are working on training your brain to hear new words better, increasing the amount of words you encounter as opposed to things your brain simply overlooks. It also increases your chance of saying words properly and therefore making you better at being able to distinguish different meanings.
Collocation is the most powerful method because meaning is associated with other words, multiplying explicatively the amount of words you use, encounter and remember. Coupled with actually learning how to hear and say the words by practising their pronunciation, this way of learning vocabulary is by far the best.
However associating meaning does not need to be restricted to these things – and it shouldn’t. When you encounter new words, phrases and sounds, associate them with the time, the place and who said them. If you really like lists then don’t write down translations – draw pictures of the meaning, draw someone who would say the word or write down a short phrase that is related to the meaning. By taking this little bit of extra effort at the time of learning, you will be reinforce your memory and gain a much deeper understanding of what the words actually mean and how you should use them.