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Vocabulary Practice

Never A Goal In Itself

Vocabulary practice should never be a goal in itself. Do you want to remember a list of words? What use is that, unless it's your grocery list? What you need is to remember words embedded in sentences or combined with specific other words. When you are looking for the French word for "Father", in the best case when you were taught at school, you will think of "Mon père fume une pipe" and then you will think hey, "Father" was "Père", now I remember. In the worst case you'll just remember "Père" if it was part of a list of words you crammed. If you're using word clouds, you might remember saying "Mère", then "Père" will come by itself. But if you learned the word when reading, there will be a lot of things that would make you remember this particular word, plus remembering this word will also bring back a lot of connected words and sentences and parts of stories.

Bermuda Word Software

The software that you read your Bermuda Word e-book in will support remembering any new words in context. When you look at a word that you have trouble remembering for example because it is very low frequency (occurs just once or two times in the text) the list will have the option to show you the sentence in which context the word occurs. Next to that you can sort your vocabulary on new word "age". Which means that every given moment you can study the words you learned x minutes, hours or days ago, which will support spaced repetition and memorizing those new words. My Word testing will automatically test on the oldest words in your list, which refreshes their date.

 

My Vocabulary

You can also sort on number of tests remaining, or the frequency of the word in the text. For example if you want to see how much you will have to test your new words until you can progress to the next chapter of the book (if you have TeacherMode set to ON and are not reading freely). Or for example if you want to remove words that are very high frequency because you encountered them enough times by now to remember.

Although studies show that Spaced Repetition is good for memorizing, they also show that most people don't know about this, and don't use it. By integrating it in the e-book software you will use Spaced Repetition automatically without it becoming a boring task as with Flashcards systems and the e-book software will make sure you also memorize the less frequent words that you won't encounter in the text anymore.