For about a year I tried Anki. I made beautiful, colour-coded decks of words I wanted to remember. I reviewed them on the bus, in waiting rooms, in bed. I was very disciplined. And I forgot almost all of them.
What I have seen, both in myself and in nineteen years of students, is that words you collect are not words you keep. Words you use are. So here is the small habit I now teach instead. It is unfashionable. It takes about twenty minutes a week. It works.
The habit, in three steps
Step 1 — Keep a small physical notebook
Not your phone. A paper notebook the size of your palm. Carry it with you. Whenever you read or hear an English word you don't fully understand — in an article, a meeting, a Netflix show — write it down. Don't look it up yet. Just collect it. The collection itself is the point.
Step 2 — Once a week, sit with the notebook
On a Sunday morning, with coffee, open the notebook. Look at the week's words. You should have somewhere between fifteen and forty. For each word, do three things:
- Look it up in a good English-English dictionary (Cambridge or Merriam-Webster online). Read the definition, the example sentences and any usage notes. Don't translate. Read it in English.
- Note where you saw the word. "From the article about housing." This anchor makes the word stick.
- Write one sentence using the word, about your own life. Not a textbook sentence — a sentence about your week.
"Vocabulary is not stored as a list. It is stored as a web of context, sound and use."
Step 3 — Try to use three of them this week
From the week's batch, choose three words you would actually like to start using. In conversation, in an email, in a meeting. Try them. Get one wrong. Get one right. Notice the difference. That noticing is the moment the word moves from "recognised" to "owned".
Why this works when flashcards don't
Flashcards train you to recognise a word in isolation. Real conversation requires you to produce a word in the right context, at the right moment, with the right collocation. The notebook habit forces you to engage with the word at the level you actually need: situated, in use, attached to memory.
The students of mine who keep this habit consistently learn about 80 genuinely active words a month. That is roughly 1,000 words a year, which is more than enough to move you from comfortable B2 to confident C1 over a couple of years — without any guilt or streak-chasing.
One quiet warning
Do not skip Step 1. The temptation is to "just look it up" the moment you encounter the word. Resist this. The act of collecting — and the small delay between encounter and definition — is what builds memory. Trust the small notebook. Trust the habit. Words will come.
Marcus Holloway is a senior tutor at Fluora English. His own vocabulary notebook is on its eleventh volume.