Pop-up dictionaries - how perilous are they?

[imron]

I'd recommend taking a look over at mnemotechnics.org because drills are a very inefficient way to pick up new words and they have a ton of information about how to memorize vocabularly efficiently.

I'm quite familiar with mnemonic techniques for memorizing things.  Personally however, I don't find remembering vocabulary by way of another mostly unrelated thing to be an efficient way to deal with language learning because it adds an intermediary step to the entire process that slows down actual usage of the language (though it might be great for helping remember individual items in isolation).  I'm even less of a fan of associating it with things that 'sound similar', which help reinforce poor pronunciation.

 

Being able to recall a word in isolation, with 15 seconds* to conjure up your mnemonic and associate it with the word is a completely different skill from how to you would actually use the word in a real word situation.

 

*15 seconds is the time listed in the study linked to on the site you mentioned.

 

For real world usage, you basically need instant or near instant recall for listening/reading, though slightly slower recall is acceptable in speech.  Adding steps where you remember one thing to then remember the English, will slow the process and make language usage stilted and broken.