The problem with vocabulary is not memorising it, it is still having it a week later. A student can learn fifty words tonight, write them correctly tomorrow, and fail to recognise the same words in a text two weeks on. Knowledge acquired in one sitting is knowledge the brain has quietly marked as not needed again.
The methods that work all attack that point: meeting the word repeatedly, at widening intervals, and in more than one context.
Why do words disappear so fast?
Because they are learned as a single pairing in a single context. A word stored as "reliable equals trustworthy in my language" hangs from one thread. Cut the thread and the word is gone. Meet the same word in a phrase, in a question and in a text, and three separate connections form, so one can fail without losing the word.
The second reason is timing. Reading the same list three times in a row feels easy, and ease gets mistaken for learning, when recall actually strengthens when time is allowed to pass in between. Spaced repetition and active recall covers the intervals in detail.
How many words a day?
Ten new ones, plus the review of earlier days. Twenty-five a day is possible in week one and collapses in week two, when the review load catches up. Ten a day still passes three thousand in a year, which is more than enough for most exams.
What matters is not the number of new words but the number of reviewed ones. Most of a session should go to old words, with new ones at the end. Do it the other way round and you learn new vocabulary continuously while losing the old at the same rate.
Lists or phrases?
Phrases, but short ones. Learning a word inside a three or four word chunk gives you meaning and usage at once: "reliable source", "take responsibility", "pay attention to". Those chunks pay off directly in exams, because questions usually test which words go together.
Long example sentences backfire. Memorising ten words to acquire one is poor value. The goal is to meet the word in a familiar neighbourhood.
Do not throw out the translation either. Guessing purely from context is slow in the early stages. The order that works: learn the translation once, then drill the word inside its chunk, then let the translation become unnecessary.
How should flashcards be used?
Backwards. Seeing the foreign word and saying the meaning trains recognition; seeing the meaning and producing the foreign word trains production. The second is harder, which is why it teaches more.
The interval belongs on the card too. A word recalled correctly moves to a longer gap, a word missed goes back to the start. The three-box method is easy with paper cards: today's words in box one, reviewed in two days in box two, reviewed in a week in box three, one box forward when correct, back to box one when not.
One more test: if you cannot produce the answer within a second, the word is not learned yet. Words retrieved by thinking cost you time in an exam.
Do shows and songs help?
For consolidation yes, for learning not on their own. Watching without subtitles lets you hear words you already know at natural speed, which is valuable, but the meaning of an unknown word is lost in the flow, so new vocabulary arrives slowly.
The mix that works: watch an episode, then rewind for two or three words, note them and add them to your cards. Trying to extract ten words from one episode ruins both the enjoyment and the learning.
Reading is more efficient than watching for this. In a text near your level the number of unknown words stays small enough for context to do real work. More than five unknown words per page means the text is too hard, not that you are too slow.
How much do roots and affixes speed things up?
A great deal, and most learners find out late. Taking a word with its family turns one item into three or four: decide, decision, decisive, indecisive. The same holds for prefixes: un-, dis- and in- carry negation, re- carries repetition, -tion and -ment build nouns.
In exams this pays twice. Word formation questions test the patterns directly, and being able to guess an unknown word from its root saves time in reading sections.
How do you study vocabulary for an exam?
From the exam's own pool. Academic tests draw their texts from formal and scientific writing, so academic word lists beat conversational vocabulary. For a school exam the source is obvious: the unit's word list and the phrases that appear in it.
With two weeks to go, the most efficient move is to stop learning new words and turn the known ones into usable ones. Translation is a good drill for this: trying to put a sentence from your own language into the target language shows immediately which words are familiar but not yet available.
For the memory side, memory techniques give usable methods, and building a visual link is particularly effective for abstract words.
How many words are enough?
It depends on the goal, and which words matter more than how many. The few thousand most frequent words carry most of what you read, while time spent on rare ones returns much less. Studying from frequency lists beats collecting words at random.
A practical measure: if you can read something at your level without opening a dictionary and still catch the main idea, you are carrying that level's vocabulary. If you reach for a dictionary at every turn, dropping one level down gets you there faster.