How to Memorize Vocabulary You Can Say Later

Tomorrow you'll test it cold. That test is the Cold Say-Back, and this page is where this site defines it. The rules and counts below are a House routine: this site's choice, untested with learners.

What is a Cold Say-Back?

It's a test with nothing to look at. You say a sentence or a rule in your own voice. Only then do you check it. In your first two weeks, when you have few sentences, a word pair or a sound works too.

The full rules:

1. Wait at least one night. A sentence from this morning can't be tested this evening.
2. Nothing in front of you. No card, no book, no audio.
3. Say it out loud. Use your own voice, not a voice in your head.
4. Then check it. If you got it right, count that sentence as remembered. If not, test it again tomorrow.
5. Two right days in a row, and it leaves your daily list.

"Remembered" means you could say it that day. It doesn't promise that you'll still have it next year, and this page doesn't claim that.

Why test a sentence and not a single word?

A sentence is what you'll need when you talk. A word on its own leaves you to build the rest on the spot. So when you meet a new word, find a short sentence that holds it, and learn the sentence.

Anki's user manual makes a similar suggestion for language learners. It advises against long lists of words and toward seeing each word used in a sentence. That's the manual's advice, not a study.

In German, the sentence also carries the word in front of the noun, so der comes along with Bahnhof. That habit is the heart of learning each noun with its article. The word in front can change in other sentences, as German cases explains, so learn the noun with the article you'd find in a dictionary, as on the der, die, das page.

Keep the sentence short enough to say in one breath (House routine). Sentence mining shows where to find good ones, and the first 1,000 words gives you common words to start from. In your first two weeks, a pair from the minimal pairs tool can be the thing you say back.

What counts as cold?

Cold means you start from nothing. The table shows where the line falls.

If you glanced at the card, it wasn't cold. Check it anyway, and test it again tomorrow.

Be strict about "right." Anki's manual has a related line for its Again button: an answer that's only partly right, and that would fail in real life, counts as a fail. This site's line is stricter (House routine): if one word or one ending came out wrong, it's not right, and the sentence comes back tomorrow.

Check against the source: the page, transcript or written line the sentence came from. Don't check against your memory of it, since that's the thing being tested. If your own copy doesn't match the source, count it as not right, fix the copy and test it again tomorrow.

When does a sentence leave your daily list?

After two right days in a row. A miss starts the count again.

Leaving the daily list doesn't mean it's gone for good. If you keep sentence cards, it stays in that stack. The Anki page shows how to make those cards and how to say them out loud.

Two days is this site's number. It helps keep the daily list short.

What does a week of this look like?

Say you start a Spanish list on Monday. Here's how two sentences might move through it.

On Tuesday, one missing word made the coffee line "not right." That's the strict check from above at work. It's also why the coffee line stayed a day longer.

Keep the list somewhere you won't see it by accident before you speak, such as a page you flip open only after you've said each line. A short list on paper is enough. Next to each sentence, mark the days it came out right, so you can see when two marks sit side by side (House routine).

New sentences join the list on the day after you learn them. So the list grows by what you add and shrinks by what leaves.

How many minutes does it take?

Very few. The Cold Say-Back opens the day, before anything else, and it takes 1, 2 or 3 minutes.

One minute fits a line or two. When the time is up, stop. Lines you didn't reach stay on the list.

Next time, go in this order (House routine): lines that came out wrong, then lines that were right once and need a second right day, then the ones you didn't reach, then the newest. A line that was right once but didn't get tested today hasn't had its second day, so it stays on the list.

The list stays short only while most lines come out right two days in a row, since that's when they leave it. Each test also tells you which lines still need work.

Day 1 has nothing to test yet, so the Cold Say-Back minutes go to the main job. The 90-day plan shows what the main job is on each day.

The timer runs while you're saying a line, and it stops while you check your list. The shadowing page has the full rules for that count, and the Mile Log keeps it.

After a long break, start with a Cold Say-Back on a few old lines. Any line you can't say goes back on your daily list. Then carry on from where you stopped.

Tomorrow, before you look at anything, say your hungry sentence from the top of this page. Say it out loud, once. Then come back here and check it.