Why do people forget the new words they learn?

All those who decide to learn a language have a goal: being able to express themselves in their new language. But, unfortunately, not everyone is prepared to make the extra effort required to achieve fluency and one of the pillars of any language is vocabulary. Only a few will act, and very few will persist in the quest of committing all these new words to their long-term memory.

Most feel lost in the maze of rote-memorisation (the way we were taught at school) finding it boring and pointless because what is learned is easily forgotten. Some attribute the latter to their bad memory, others think it’s because they are useless at language learning.

So, how can we learn vocabulary effectively, so that the words, phrases and expressions pop out when they are needed?

There are multiple methods described since ancient times advocating their ability to make us remember any information we read, people names, lists of things we need to do etc.