How many new words have you learned in your target language? How did you learn them? Do you have realistic goals for your acquisition of vocabulary?
In my tutoring sessions, we have two vocabulary charts per chapter, each having an average of 20 terms. They include nouns, adjectives, verbs, and particles of which I usually recognize about 5 from past Korean studies. All of these terms add up to about 120 vocabulary words we have covered. Every lesson, we have a quiz on the past week's vocabulary chart to test how much we remember. This is really useful because it makes us look over the words and helps us learn more in the long run.
In my personal lessons, I have learned the Korean words for colors, days of the week, months, family vocabulary and more. The most helpful strategy to remembering these terms is to write them on sticky notes and put them around my room. It's the most effective when I can correlate a word with an object, for example putting the word for black on my black microwave. This way, I am constantly looking at them and processing the words multiple times per day.
At the beginning of the semester, I had unrealistic goals for how many words I would learn per week; especially with the tutoring sessions and my learning plan lessons combined. Because I can only learn so much material, I choose certain terms and phrases I want to learn from each chapter of the textbook I use for myself. This way I can learn more specifically what will be most helpful in achieving my language goals.
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