Hi chicka.boo, I am with you. Vocab is the hardest thing for me to learn (and not just in German - my English vocab can be pretty atrocious sometimes but that's what thesauruses are for
)
Here are some really daggy ways to remember, but it helps me:
- Game/flash cards - especially when it comes to those tricky little words - is it different FROM or different TO?
- Coloured lists - I write "die" words in pink, "der" in blue and "das" in green. I group them too. My brain then remembers the colour and hence I am better at remembering the gender.
- Small, topic related lists posted on the wall in a prominent position when I will be standing and doing STUFF and can't help but see it. I had my list in front of the kitchen bench where I would see it every time I was preparing dinner (I did a DipLang as a mature age). So, I got an eye full of that list every night. I changed the list once a week. Other places that might work: shower, toilet, television room.
- Pictures - I would draw pictures to help me remember words. Especially with compound words. I would try and pull the word and apart and see a picture. eg Handschuh - that's a hand shoe. So rather than remembering that it is GLOVE, I remembered hand shoe and made myself a mental/physical picture of a shoe on a hand. Same with compound verbs with seperable prefixes. They get tricky. But teilnehmen (to take part) look at it - teil = part, nehmen = to take.
- Looking for patterns - German can be quite logical. But then again, I like to find patterns in anything to help remember it. I can't really give you a concrete example of this, but I did always try to be very literal with my translation of words so I could get that weird mental picture to help me remember words.
- Don't try and remember the exact English word for things. Try and get a sense of what the word means and how to use it. This also helps with understanding spoken German (listening skills) because you know what it means. Sometimes it doesn't matter if you can't translate it.
- Practice, practice, practice - write it, use it, speak it. When you don't understand a german word, DON'T write it's meaning in English, if you can help it. Try and write a simple German definition.
- If you learn a new word, write it down, make sure you use it again soon and a few times. It's a amazing how that works. You learn a few new words and just use them over and over and people think you are some German guru.
That's why you should speak it with others. They use words that you can use and parrot back!
Anyway, I hope those tips help.
