Learning vocabulary doesn't have to be about boring lists. There are many ways that we can engage with vocabulary to make learning it more fun.
In fact, actively engaging with vocabulary makes it easier to commit to long-term memory.
In an effort to memorise the much-despised and grammatically important German noun genders I often used colours to aid my memory so that the gender would come to me in a flash, even in casual conversation.
In this way the German noun for "factory" Die Fabrik still appears in my memory as a quaint pink affair made from quilting rather than bricks (fabric - geddit?!) much like one might expect to see in a Little Big Planet game.
...so one can even engage with the mundane and the downright disgusting. So on to our German Word of the Day: "corpse". Lovely. How would we go about remembering this one?
website: Memrise.com
Fans of the film "Stand By Me" or similar could try an image association such as above.
There's also the phonetic route which has also been highlighted above, where a phrase is used to bring to mind the word and its pronunciation ("Leiche" and "like a" sound very close to one another)
Other media still could be used to anchor the vocabulary in a deeper way. Becoming familiar with a song that utilises the vocabulary in a meaningful way is a sure-fire way never to forget a word or its meaning. The downside: your understanding of the language would need to be more advanced for this not to be an awful lot of legwork for the benefit of remembering a single word.
Farin Urlaub Racing Team's haunting "die Leiche" tells the story of a body floating in a lake ("Leiche" and "Teich" rhyme making this easier still to remember) and how it came to be there. A quick skim of the translated lyrics could make this vocabulary that you never forget. Chilling, but effective!
Have fun. Be creative!
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