As both a teacher and a learner, I’ve tried several methods and have drawn some informal conclusions. This list is subjective, and the methods you choose should take individual goals and learning styles in account.
The Most Effective Method: Word Lists with Practice Questions and Reading Passages
Although this is not always the most accessible route, it’s quite effective for teaching and learning. As long as learners complete every question and spend a decent amount of time on each section, they end up retaining the terms weeks after they initially encountered them.
The first big weakness is that you can’t control what words appear in a list, which is especially frustrating when the grouping choices are arbitrary(e.g. why learn how to say baseball before you can say bathroom?).
I was resistant to using this as a teacher, but I found that students who did their assigned workbook pages could recall the terms easily and were able to understand the terms in depth.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, as I made some of my most significant Mandarin learning strides because my first teacher strongly adhered to a textbook curriculum.
Flashcards
Flashcards are not a bad study tool, but because you’re not actively seeing or using it in context, the words you study end up becoming piece of information you can recognize instead of naturally settling in as part of your vocabulary.
A huge benefit, however, is being able to review terms quickly and easily. It makes small pockets of time productive, and it can easily develop into a good habit.
Because it can be so easy to whip out flashcards on a commute, I tried developing smart flashcard tools that target my weakest words, or that show me terms in small groupings. To be honest, it didn’t actually add much to my language learning progress. I’ve found that flashcards work best a supplement to a small vocabulary list you’re actively studying and engaging with.
Graded Readers
Graded readers work really well for self-learners who may find language textbook sections scattered and unengaging. A major benefit is that the vocabulary terms you learn are usually linked to the theme of the story (so if you’re interested in learning about technology terms, for example, you should read a story about technology).
Graded readers are especially powerful when the passages are multichapter and use new terms consistently throughout. This is a surefire way to naturally integrate the vocabulary recognition into your brain.
But like flashcards, learners don’t get to actively use the new words. They encounter them in a variety of contexts, but they don’t get the opportunity to use it in a sentence or conversation themselves.
Videos
Videos are a great way to gain initial exposure to new terms, and can help learners understand the nuance around terms. If a learner has no teacher, videos also offer learners an opportunity to learn pronunciation and practice hearing it in speech.
But videos have some major limitations because of its format. Vocabulary takes a decent amount of repetition to learn, but the repetition ought to be varied. Watching a video repeatedly is not as helpful as one might expect, especially since they become less and less engaging the more you watch it.
Videos also have a fixed pace: students have to slow down, speed up, pause, and search through the scrubber if they want the video to align with their pace/needs.