Here are some useful strategies based on brain research, which will boost your learning - guaranteed!

And this will work for long-term retention of any subject, not just languages. So if you want to remember what you have learnt years later, this is how it's done.

For an excellent book on the subject of learning theories, I recommend:

MAKE IT STICK - THE SCIENCE OF SUCCESSFUL LEARNING

by Peter C. Brown et al.

When you try to recall a word or phrase, your brain builds stronger neural connections.

It takes effort but by testing yourself on words regularly & digging in your brain to try to remember it, that struggle itself is what causes learning.

One of the best ways to do this is to translate the target vocabulary or grammar point from your native language, or if you know a second language, use that one for your learning. This will help prevent language interference, which can happen when you speak more than one foreign language.

So, always learn your third language through your second one.

By revising words with time in between & doing “retrieval practice” just before you would forget that word, it moves it into your long term memory.

Below is a suggested routine to do retrieval practice + spaced repetition. Experiment with the timing & see what works best for you:

Revise new vocabulary after:

• 1 day
• 3 days
• 7 days
• 2 weeks
• 1 month
• 3 months
• 6 months
• 1 year

Also, make sure you don't just learn individual words - always put them into context of a sentence because our brains remember meaning & stories best.

And then make that sentence personally relevant to you - the more emotional connection you have to the example sentence, the more the meaning of the sentence affects you, the better your memory of that vocabulary will be. This is why, for instance, people remember rude words in a new language so fast!

So when learning new vocabulary, be a bit wild & make up some strange, surprising or intense scenarios in which you can imagine using that word or phrase.

The more playful you are, the more you will learn!

Don’t learn just one thing, but by mixing up topics you learn, your brain builds more connections between them so you have more pathways in your memory.

It also allows for deeper learning – it’s like eating a variety of flavours. It makes it more interesting & the information becomes interrelated in your understanding.

Handwriting requires more of the brain’s motor programmes than typing.

A recent study monitored brain activity in students taking notes, & found that those writing by hand had higher levels of electrical activity across a wide range of interconnected brain regions responsible for movement, vision, sensory processing & memory.

Have you ever wondered why you can understand more than you can say? Why is it that your passive knowledge is more than your active knowledge in a language?

Well, there are actually two areas of the brain that are responsible for language: Broka's Area & Wernicke's Area. And they are completely separate, in different parts of the brain! This really surprised me when I first heard about it in a psychology lecture.

Broka's area is responsible for speech production & Wernicke's controls the ability to understand the meaning of words.

In short, both areas need to be used & exercised regularly, & part of learning is activating the passive knowledge by actually using it. Don't just watch films & TV shows in English, but also talk to yourself out loud, sing, write every day for 5 minutes, play games like Activity in English.

Do things you enjoy & do them in English, but be aware of whether it is active or passive practice you are involved in, & keep a balanced mix.

You might be surprised to learn that pronunciation is actually more important than grammar, when it comes to making yourself understood.

Many adults get hung up on speaking grammatically correctly, but if you have enough vocabulary to throw together a sentence, good pronunciation is far more important in communication.

English is a rhythm based language, & each word has a specific stressed syllable, & the sentences themselves have words that are more stressed than others, which can influence the meaning. So, for this reason in my lessons I focus on pronunciation right from the start.

For instance take the words:

1. Dessert (like Tiramisu)
2. Desert (like the Sahara desert)

They both essentially have the same sounds, but the first is stressed at the end, which makes it mean something sweet you eat at the end of a meal, and the second is stressed at the beginning, and it them means a very dry and arid place, full of sand.

In sentences, the words that carry the most meaning are usually stressed, & other words in-between are pronounced more softly (called ‘weak forms’). This is often why it is more difficult to understand native speakers.

Becoming aware of this will not only help your own pronunciation, but it will help you with your listening skills to better understand TV shows & films.

Look at the stressed words in this sentence:

• The words that carry the most meaning are usually stressed.

So start paying attention & training your ear to intonation, and it will help you with you own pronuncation as you become more aware of this rhythmical aspect of English.

English is quite an abstract language, with lots of phrasal verbs, collocations, informal expressions, proverbs, idioms & figurative speech. So to better recall vocabulary, it's useful to become playful in your learning and create some memory-strategies to help you remember vocabulary. I'll give you a couple of examples, of what that looks like at different levels:

For beginners, phrasal verbs like look for, look up, look at, look after, can be confusing, so to learn ‘look up’ for instance, which means to search for information, combine the literal meaning with the figurative meaning by imagining a dictionary suck to the ceiling & every time you need to search for a word, you need to literally look up.

For mode advanced levels, idiomatic expressions are great because you get to work on your articulation and really start to build expressing your unique personality & style in English. But there are so many proverbs and sayings that it's hard to keep track. So find a saying you like, such as “He is a bad apple in that department” - a bad apple is a person who creates problems or is a bad influence on the other people in a group. If you have a basket of apples & one of them is rotten, the rot can spread quickly to the rest.

Now imagine someone you know who is like that, or someone from your past, your childhood, or even a film character like the Grinch, that you can relate to as being a bad influence, causing trouble in a group etc, & imagine their face on the apple with a melodramatically nasty expression, & as the apple rots, it infests the other apples around it, also with faces of people.

You can also use another language to help you remember new vocabulary. For example, in Hungarian, ‘hang’ means a sound or voice, but in English ‘to hang’ means to put something on a hook. So, you can imagine hanging a musical note on a hook and imagine it singing your favourite song as it hangs there happily. Or perhaps it's singing a sad song because it's not happy to hang there - whatever works best for your memoricaiton!

Or in Spanish, sopa (meaning soup- the liquid food) sounds like the English words soap (jabón in Spanish), so to remember the difference in meaning of this 'false friend', imagine someone playing a practical joke on a friend and giving them soapy water to eat instead of soup. The victim would not be impressed & spurts the soapy water all over their friend, who will hopefully never play such cruel jokes again after that!

Using your imagination like this might at first seem like it takes too long, but in fact once you start doing this, you will be surprised at how quickly you can make connections, & it doesn’t take that long at all.

Once you get rolling with this new method, the vivid images you create will have you remember vocab so much faster, that it is worth the investment! The more you practice this playful visualisation method, the more emotionally charged it is, the faster you will remember new expressions & vocabulary. Plus it will boost you creativity in general & make learning more fun - & sometimes even funny!

Hope that inspires!