Learners share a habit: meet an unfamiliar word in a book, look it up, and write the Vietnamese meaning right next to it. Do not do this.
Why it backfires
Once the meaning sits beside the word, you can never again tell which words you know and which you do not. Your eye reads the translation before your memory has a chance to produce it. That is why certain words get looked up again and again and never stick.
What to do instead
Write the word somewhere else on the page, in a margin or a corner, and leave the meaning off.
While we are here: do write in the book. A heavily annotated book is usually a well-studied book. The pristine one is usually the one nobody learned much from.
Next time you come back to that list, one of two things happens:
- You see the word and the meaning comes to you. You genuinely know it, and you are allowed to feel good about that.
- You see it and nothing comes. Fine. Look it up once more.
Why this works
It is the act of having to retrieve it, and failing, and looking it up that makes your brain work. And the brain has to do that work several times before anything sticks. Memory runs on a cycle of knowing, forgetting and recovering, roughly three to five times over. Without those repetitions, it does not hold.
When you return to your list of unknowns, you get real information: of these ten, I now know seven and I have lost three. So you revisit exactly those three.
Progress comes from finding what you got wrong and what you do not yet know, then repeating precisely those things. Practice built that way is far more efficient.