Why You Keep Forgetting English (and How to Fix It)

You don’t have a bad memory.

You just have a bad study method.

In this episode, I’ll show you exactly why your English isn’t sticking and what to do instead if you actually want to remember what you learn.

 If this episode helped you, make sure you subscribe or follow the podcast so you don’t miss next week’s training, and if you need help with your English, send me a message on Instagram and let's chat. 

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Transcript

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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Cambridge Advanced Accelerator podcast. My name is Cheryl, and I'm here to give you a little bit of motivation going into the week so that you can improve your English up to that C1 or even C2 level and absolutely smash your Cambridge Advanced exam. So, this week I want to talk to you a little bit about how to best study vocabulary, how to remember vocabulary, especially if you're anything like me and you you are very forgetful, you have a bad memory, it's really hard to retain information. So, what is the best method for people like me? Um, but not just with vocabulary, um, how can we use some of the very successful and um scientifically proven techniques to remember vocabulary? But how can we use those to help us improve our exam scores and to help us improve in our reading or use of English or listening, uh, our writing or speaking as well? So that's what we're going to look at a little bit today. Okay, so first thing with vocabulary. The best way to remember vocabulary is through a thing called spaced repetition. Now you might have heard this before and you're thinking, uh, I do not need to listen to this podcast. I know what spaced repetition is. Great if you know what it is, but you've probably been doing it the wrong way or in not as efficient a way as you could be. Okay, so keep listening. Um, so spaced repetition, for those of you who don't know what it is, means when you study something like vocabulary, okay, you study something like vocabulary, and then you wait a set amount of time, for example, one day, and then you study that vocabulary again, and then you wait another day and you study that vocabulary again. Sounds quite simple, right? However, there's a bit more of an art to it than just looking at vocabulary once a day, okay. Um, so first thing we need to realize is that the key behind spaced repetition is that we want to kind of forget words a little bit, okay. Uh, and that sounds really strange, but it's in the recalling of words, the remembering of words, okay. Um, this is what strengthens your brain and strengthens the memory or the possibility that you're going to remember words. Okay, I know it sounds really strange, but it's one of the most researched learning techniques that exists out there, okay? So you're supposed to forget a little, but so when you review something that you've almost forgotten, your brain is working harder, and that effort is what makes the memory stronger. Okay, so here's the important thing. If you study vocabulary, let's say you study it in a class, you study that vocabulary, and then you go and immediately practice it again, okay? This is not spaced repetition because we haven't given our brain a chance to forget that language, okay? So we need to leave it a little bit longer. So either you're studying in the morning for five or ten minutes, you're studying your vocabulary, your new vocabulary, and then you go and look at it again at the end of the day, in the evening, okay? Or you go look at it again the following day, okay? We want to leave a big chunk of time between our spaced repetitions to give our brain that chance to almost forget it. Now, at the same time, we don't want to leave it too long because our brain will completely forget it. So you don't want to learn vocabulary on a Monday and then not look at it again until Saturday. That's too long. Okay? Um, when it's new vocabulary, once a day. Once a day can be our happy place, okay. As that vocabulary becomes more comfortable, as it's not new anymore, we can increase the spaces. So instead of studying it once a day, we can study it once a day for a week. It's become comfortable, okay? Let's study it once every three or four days. We still remember it, it's still comfortable. Let's study it once every couple of weeks. We're still remembering it, still comfortable once a month. Still remembering it once every three months, okay? And we're gradually increasing that space as it's becoming a stronger and stronger thing in our head until we do not need to look at our flashcards anymore of our new vocabulary. So this is step one, okay. Step two is how we are using our flashcards or how we are reviewing that vocabulary that we're looking at with a space repetition with space-time. Okay, so this is the this is where the magic happens, right? Um, so spacing alone is not enough. We also need retrieval. Okay, retrieval. So what does that mean exactly? Basically, the majority of people, when they say they're they're practicing their vocabulary, they're practicing their flashcards, what they mean by that is they're opening up their flashcards and they're just looking at the word and they're reading the word and be like, okay, yep, I know that word, I've seen that before. Let's go to the next one. Yep, I know that word, I know that word, I know that word. Brilliant! I've done my space repetition, I know all the words, fantastic, I'm doing great. But then when it comes to speaking, or it comes to writing, they get really frustrated because they're like, Oh, I was doing great with my flashcards, I'm doing them every day, I'm doing exactly as Cheryl tells me, but when I go to speak or I go to write, I still can't remember them. What is wrong? What's going on? Okay, this is because we're not using retrieval, okay. Just reading the vocabulary is a passive skill, it's passive learning, okay? Like when you're reading a book and you understand vocabulary, okay. Um, but we need to help our brain be able to recall that vocabulary. We need to be able to retrieve the vocabulary when we're speaking and we're writing. So instead of reading the word that is on the piece of paper or on our flashcard, what we need to do is this rather than looking at the word that you have, okay, on your flashcard, flip your flashcards. Okay, flip your flashcard and look at the definition of the word, okay? Or a sentence with a gap in it with the word that you need. Okay. Uh flip it over, and this is going to force your brain to have to remember the word, to produce the word, to recall the word. Okay. This is much more difficult, it's much more effort, it's a bit slower, and you're gonna forget things, it's gonna be harder, but that is going to push your brain more, and it's gonna force your brain to strengthen that connection to the word, which means that this is activating the language, okay? And when it's active, when you're able to recall it, then you're going to be able to do the same when you are speaking or when you're writing, which, after all, is the important thing that we need. And of course, every time you do this, every time you're forcing your brain to rebuild the memory of the word again and again and again, you're making your brain stronger and you're making that connection to the word stronger. Okay, so practice your pro your your flashcards, practice your new vocabulary once a day, okay, for short periods of time, like 15 minutes, 10 minutes, even five minutes, practice it once a day, but practice it with that retrieval. Okay, flip your flashcards over and actively force your brain to remember the word. And then if we want to accelerate this even more, if we want to make this even more successful, we want to combine our space repetition and retrieval with speaking practice and writing practice. Okay, that's why we have on all the courses uh unlimited speaking sessions and unlimited writing feedback so that you can do this, so that you can activate your language. And it doesn't just have to be with vocabulary, okay? This can be the same thing with grammar. If you're studying conditionals, just looking at a conditional sentence is passive learning. If you want to activate it, if you want to recall it, okay, then you want to be able to write sentences and speak using that grammar, and that is going to help you. Again, little and often, if you do that every single day, you're going to get much, much better than if you just do it once on a Monday and you try and sit and do it for three hours and then you do nothing until the weekend or till the next week, then it's not gonna stick. Or if you look at grammar once and that's it. You're like, okay, I've learned it, it is done. I have done that grammar chapter, I am finished. It doesn't work like that with languages, okay? We need to see it little and often, little and often, little and often. But give your brain that little bit of time to forget it and then come back to it and practice actively recalling it. We can even apply this technique to exam tasks, okay? So rather than sitting and doing a use of English exam, okay, rather than sitting with use of English part four, okay, these kind of grammar and vocabulary testers, rather than sitting with use of English part four and sitting all day and doing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of use of English part four exercises, do a smaller amount every day. Okay, do a smaller amount throughout the week. Rather than doing six reading part seven tasks in a row, do one a day for six days. Okay, this is gonna be more effective for you. It's gonna give your brain a chance to um to digest all that information, it's gonna give you the opportunity to analyze your errors in between tasks and think about okay, why did I make that mistake? What was the issue there? And then think about how to fix that before moving on to the next task. If you just do task after task after task after task, you're not giving yourself the opportunity to fix it before trying again, okay? And then we're just so we're just gonna be repeating the same mistake after mistake after mistake without learning from that mistake. And we're also gonna be burning through tests. There are only so many tests in existence, and if we just burn through the tests without analyzing and without uh working on our mistakes, then we're gonna have no more tests left to do at the end of it, and we're still gonna be kind of getting the same scores. So, very, very important, little and often with your learning, with everything. Okay, little and often is key. Now, there are many, many other techniques that we can use to improve our vocabulary, to improve our active language skills, being able to use language when we're speaking or writing. Um, but this is one of the most important ones and the most heavily researched one. That's spaced repetition with the recall, the active reef recall, and then using that when you're speaking and when you're writing. Um, over the next few weeks uh I'll make I'll make a little um a little guide to this, and we'll go deeper into some other techniques that you can use, not just for um learning vocabulary, but for organizing your study, studying, improving your study skills, what to do when you're feeling tired, uh, how to to motivate yourself. Um, in fact, this is what we do on this podcast. So um if you're a new listener, go back and check out some of the previous episodes uh because we do talk about this in depth. And I'm actually writing a book about it at the moment. That's one of my goals for 2026, is to uh write a book to help you improve your organization and study skills and memory in order to get to that kind of fluent level of English. So, anyway, more on that later, but I hope you find this useful. And if you have any questions at all, please let me know. And let's have a fantastic week, guys, with lots of spaced repetition.