Beginning to Learn Foreign Vocabulary

The article is an attempt to provide a comprehensive review of the experimental findings on foreign vocabulary learning. Almost all the research has been carried out on learning word pairs made up of a foreign word paired with its mother-tongue translation. The first section of the review compares direct and indirect vocabulary learning. The second section reviews the evidence on how much vocabulary can be learned in a given time, how many repetitions are required for learning to occur, and why some words are more difficult to learn than others. The section on technique compares the effectiveness of a variety of techniques for receptive and productive vocabulary learning. The article concludes with advice on interpreting experiments on vocabulary learning.