two steps forward, one step back

Scott has tape?? "Scotch Tape" :-)

oops. anyway that's what they said but they never did it.

practice, practice, practice, read, write, speak, listen I sometimes need to come across words a hundred times before I remember the reading, let alone can use them

billybobjoebobwilly, You've discovered another deep dark secret of mine. When it comes to spelling, I don't know my own language very well.

Stop smoking so much pot!

You mentioned that your retention of a word goes up when you hear in it in an unrelated lesson so I would recommend using the ChinesePod dictionary to find other lessons that include the word. Of course this works best with the more common words but as the number of lessons increases there's more and more to choose from. This way you hear a word in many different contexts which often puts the word into the brain in a more painless way....

It is clearly true that the more times the word crops up the more likely you are to remember it, but for me I have a feeling that things only stick really well after I have used them actively at least once (many times?) myself.

Practice makes perfect.... or You could expand your long term memory. Flashcards in your head, to add new associations. Mental Pictures help with this...

mark, no need worry. I got the same problem (well, maybe that *is* a reason to worry...). I have given up each effort to "memorize" vocab long ago. First of all you need to differentiate between "active" and "passive" vocabulary. I bet if you hear "透明胶" in an office related context you would immediately recognize it. Furthermore as others said above: Repetition in different contexts make those words stick. If I don't remember a word (happens to me ca. 2993 a day) I just look it up. Again. And again. And again.

I'm just going to chime in and agree with what everybody else is saying -- practice, practice, practice. Someday you'll look back and think "how could I ever have forgotten something so easy!" (of course, by then, you'll have other things that you always forget -- it's a never-ending process)

I made it through a first year text book (PCR 1) about a decade ago and thought I forgot everything after not using Chinese since. A couple years ago I restarted with the same textbook not remembering anything except the main characters in the book. When we got to volume 2, which I hadn't done, it suddenly got much much harder. I'm convinced if you learn something once, you might not be able to recall it, but you haven't really forgotten it. Review and testing myself seems to help a lot.

As others have pointed out, you need to see a word more than once, and in different contexts, spaced out over time. For any one given context though, it can be helpful to space it out over several days. Whenever I do a ChinesePod lesson, I listen to the full audio on one day, do the Dialog on the following day, do the Expansion on the day after that, and do the Exercises on the fourth day. That way, you encounter the same words several times over several days. In general, it's better to be working on multiple texts/lessons in parallel (not just ChinesePod material, but CSLPod.com, melnyks.com, children's books, newspaper articles, etc), and never finish off any one lesson in a single day. Even for short newspaper articles of half a dozen paragraphs, I read the first 3 paragraphs the first day, then move on and do other stuff and finish the other 3 paragraphs the following day (without re-reading the first 3, because that would just be tedious, and tedium is the enemy of learning). I often have up to a dozen things going in parallel in this way at any one time. We live in a world of data smog, and our brains are constantly bombarded with trivial factoids and other nonsense that we have no need to remember. Encountering the same word on two different days not too far apart, in two different contexts (even if it's just different halves of the same article) is a signal to your brain that perhaps this bit of information is worth remembering. You'll probably forget it anyway, but this will lay a better foundation for success the next time you encounter it in yet another context. Flashcard software can also be helpful, but only for review rather than memorization. In other words, the only stuff that should go on flashcards should be stuff that you already know or are on the verge of learning. It's normal for routine, boring vocabulary to be forgotten a number of times before you finally remember it for good. And, unless you're a child, your passive vocabulary will always be better than your active vocabulary. We get older, our brain cells die off and we get more forgetful. That's life.

Dave, 我没有吸马达。 Aeflow, good suggestions. Others, I have also noticed that if I learn something in an emotionally charged situation, I am more likely to remember it, but so far, I haven't found a way to arrange emotionally charged situations for each word in a vocabulary list. Of course, now that I mis-spelled Scotch Tape, I probably will remember 透明胶。

And of course 透明 = transparent in both the literal non-opaque sense and the figurative sense (transparency of political processes, etc). Actually a fairly important word in its own right. As for how to construct an emotionally charged situation involving transparency, I'll leave that to your fevered imaginations.

Mark, 你的意思是"我没有抽（吸）大麻"吗？ Nǐ de yìsi shì "wǒ méiyou chōu (xī）dàmá" ma？ 有可能抽大麻会帮你学汉语的忙。 Yǒu kěnéng chōu dàmá huì bāng nǐ xué Hànyǔ de máng. 有可能抽了以后犯的错误会越来越少！ Yǒu kěnéng chōu le yǐhòu fàn de cuòwù huì yuèláiyuè shǎo！

Hey Mark, the best Chinese teacher I ever had was teaching us vocabulary in a way that wasn't pleasing every student, but it did work wonders for me: she would write the new word (sheng, to be born, for example) on the board, and then write down a lot of compound words made with this one word. So instead of learning just "birthday", we would see peanut, fresh veggies, freshman, etc. Ok, it was an information overload and we wouldn't be using all of that before a while, but I was surprised at how much I would remember naturally. So now whenever I learn a new word, I harrass my very patient husband (Taiwanese) to scratch his head and write down all the compound words he knows with that character. You might remember Scotch tape a lot more easily if you learn at the same time the other goodies that can be formed with these characters. Of course, it's a lot of effort for some miserable roll of tape!!!!

baimudan, I don't have a Chinese spouse but Wenlin works wonders :-) you can lookup all words starting with, or containing a character, you can even do it at character component level, e.g. all characters containing 寺, doesn't have to be a radical. Talking of information overload, it does give you all compounds, no matter how long. Pleco does allow you to restrict it to 2, 3 or whatever but with some characters the list can be long. Anyway, that's what I try and do too, very time-consuming, would be good if s.o. could pick the most frequent one (actually Wenlin does indicate word frequency but doesn't use it to present results).

Baimudan, Goulniky and all. Yes, I use http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php mainly (and pleco) to do a similar job. You get all words with the character used (I think in frequency order).

One thing I would really have liked is if Wenlin would keep track of your vocab somehow (or the vocab you've searched or something). Then link it all together so when you search for words containing character X, you have the option to restrict it to only those with in your own set. Wenlin does one part, CPod does the other, integrating the two would be brilliant. I'd love to have time, license the Wenlin engine and program it but I just don't. asked Wenlin to develop which they said wouldn't be much effort

Henning makes a fantastic point. Going back through lessons not only is time-consuming, but sinks into the same context. Having a great web-dictionary (of which the new Cpod one certainly qualifies) helps significantly with both.