I am trying to learn new words but pronunciation is difficult. I try to learn new words, but by the next morning I have forgotten what they were and I have to start over again. How many new words should I learn every day so that I can remember them all?
Answer
A: How long should my legs be?
B: Long enough to reach the ground.
In other words, as many as you are able to learn. If you can learn 10 a day, you'll be doing great.
The more you read (stories, newspaper articles, textbooks, not EFL textbooks, but textbooks in fields that you know something about and are interested in), the more vocabulary you'll learn and the faster you'll learn it.
Don't try to memorize vocabulary lists: that's pointless because it doesn't work. To be able to remember vocabulary, you have to recycle it, which means that you have to read those words in meaningful and interesting contexts as often as possible.
My European immigrant father-in-law learned English vocabulary by reading the newspaper (with a dictionary) every day. When I was studying French last century, I read an anthropology textbook written in French. I had to use the dictionary a lot at the beginning, but by the time I'd reached page 100, I'd learned (not merely memorized) all the important vocabulary and could rapidly read the rest of the book (another 150 pages) without needing the dictionary more than once or twice every ten pages. I love to read anthropology books, so it wasn't a chore.
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