How To Study New Vocabulary

When you are learning a new language, memorising long lists of vocabulary seems to be an essential, but often tedious, even insurmountable, task.So how do you do it?
First, I suggest you bring colours into your life, and into your vocabulary list. In German, for instance, you can use different colours for grammatical genders. There are three grammatical genders for nouns: der Mann, die Frau, das Kind. Grammatical genders do not concur with natural or biological gender. This seems obvious when you think of nouns that designate objects: der Tisch, die Lampe, das Buch. Is there a logical reason why a table should be male whereas a lamp should be female? Often, the gender has evolved from Latin, however, if you don t know Latin, this awareness won t help you jog your memory.
So how do we remember the gender and the noun itself? By making all male nouns in the list one colour, female nouns another colour, and neutral nouns a different colour as well. Of course, you will categorize the nouns by gender, and have all your blue, orange or green nouns in different places. Give your verbs and adjectives different shades as well, and that is enough colouring for one day!
Secondly, think of your vocabulary list as a form with changing patterns. Instead of keeping the vocabulary all neatly ordered in a straight jacket, why don t you experiment with creating mindmaps? For those of you who haven t worked with a mindmap yet, here is a brief descri ption of how to build one. Write the main concept or key word in the center of the page, for example fashion . Draw a nice, clean circle around it. From there you branch out, drawing lines, placing and circling other words of the same family ( fashionable ( adj.), fashionista (noun), to fashion sth (verb)), or expressions related to the same topic ( clothes , shoes ), and from there, you draw more lines to more words ( clothes , for example, can lead to shirts, pullovers, dresses etc.). In this tree of words that you are creating with ever more branches and leaves, the branches are the connections, and the words are the leaves.
And who is to stop you from using colors in your mindmap as well?
You can experiment with other patterns of course. Place the words from your list into circles or triangles and define the placement and connections between them. Or keep your words in a list but make drawings beside each word to create a visual stimulus. These drawings can sometimes just be a symbol to which you assign meaning.
Try all, or just a couple of these learning strategies and the vocabulary list will not seem dull anymore, but rather just the starting point for your learning experience.