5 Ways to Boost Salience & Supercharge Your Foreign Language Vocabulary

One of the biggest challenges in language learning is learning and retaining new vocabulary. You need to know thousands of words to have flowing conversations and understand the gist of what you hear and read.

Most learners try to simply force words in through rote memorization and sheer repetition. But even if you drill flashcards for hours, you'll quickly discover that most of the words simply won't stick.

The problem? Many of these words lack salience—they don’t stand out in your mind, so your brain throws them out. Why invest valuable neural resources on something that doesn't seem that important?

What Is Salience?

"Salience" is a fancy word for a psychological phenomenon we all experience every single day: certain stimuli capture our attention much more than others.

In general, our brains prioritize information that is:

• Emotionally engaging

• Visually or auditorily distinct

• Repeated in meaningful contexts

• Connected to prior knowledge

As Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long put it in The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity—and Will Determine the Fate of the Human:

"Things are salient when they are important to you, if they have the potential to impact your well-being, for good or for evil. Things are salient if they have the potential to affect your future. Things are salient if they trigger desire dopamine. They broadcast the message, Wake up. Pay attention. Get excited. This is important."

So what does this have to do with language learning? The more salient you can make each new word, the more easily you will be able to remember it!

Here are five ways to leverage this principle in language learning and supercharge your vocabulary.

1. Make Vocabulary More Emotionally Engaging

We remember things that evoke strong emotions. To make new words more memorable:

• Associate words them with personal experiences. If you learn the Japanese word umi (海, “beach”), try to recall a particularly enjoyable trip to the ocean. Better yet, add a photo from that trip to your Anki card. 🏖️

• Use humor. Laughter makes our brains light up like nothing else. So try making really silly mnemonics. For example, to remember the Spanish word burro ("donkey"), imagine a donkey stubbornly refusing to eat a burrito. 🫏 🌯

• Tell stories. Create a mental narrative using new words. If learning the German word Regenschirm ("umbrella"), imagine a dramatic scene where an umbrella saves the day during a violent storm. ☔️

2. Engage Multiple Senses

Salience increases when more senses are involved.

Here are some ways to integrate multiple senses and engineer a bit of useful "synesthesia" in language learning:

• Draw and doodle. Instead of just writing new words down, add a quick sketch to provide a visual dimension and integrate more physical movement. And don't worry if your drawing skills are weak; stick figures are just fine!

• Write words down by hand. Research has shown that writing things by hand improves our memory more than typing them on a keyboard. Handwritten notes also make it easier to add doodles.

• Use multiple colors. When taking handwritten notes, don't limit yourself to just black ink or a #2 pencil. Add a variety of colors to boost salience and make words (and their related stories and doodles) far more memorable.

• Speak aloud with exaggerated pronunciation. Whenever you encounter a new word, make sure to pronounce it out loud a few times. This makes it stand out more than silent reading, and also provides valuable pronunciation practice.

3. Increase Contextual Exposure

Words are more salient when they appear repeatedly in meaningful contexts.

So instead of memorizing random lists of words, try to:

• Surround yourself with the language. Change your phone and social media settings to your target language.

• Consume compelling content. Watch TV shows, read books, and listen to podcasts that interest you.

• Use words in real conversations. Even if you make mistakes, the act of using them solidifies memory.

4. Create Contrasts & Novelty

Our brains naturally pay attention to new stimuli, and anything that stands out from its surroundings.

To apply this:

• Highlight unusual or funny words. The stranger a word seems, the more memorable it becomes. So seek out quirky vocab (e.g. German's Backpfeifengesicht – "A face that is asking to be slapped"). Or add zany associations to otherwise boring words.

• Use surprising contexts. Create odd scenarios like “The dinosaur ordered sushi” (El dinosaurio pidió sushi). This is a technique used extensively by Duolingo (which many people criticize online, but is actually an effective memory enhancer).

• Compare similar words. If learning similar words (e.g. ser vs. estar in Spanish), put them side by side with example sentences that show how they differ head to head.

5. Space Out Your Learning (Spaced Repetition)

A word is more salient if you re-encounter it at optimal intervals. To that end, try to maximize meaningful repetition using one of the following approaches:

• Spaced repetition systems (SRS). Spaced repetition apps like Anki automatically optimize review timing based on how easily you remember a given word (i.e. slippery words are repeated sooner and more often).

• The Goldlist Method. Simply write words in a paper notebook and review them at designated intervals. For more, download polyglot Lýdia Machová’s free ebook The Goldlist Method.

• Narrow reading & listening. Get repetition without boredom by reading or listening to multiple resources about the same narrow topic. For more, see my post 3 Ways to Supercharge Your Memory, Get Fluent Faster & Remember New Words Forever.

Salience is the secret ingredient that makes vocabulary stick. Instead of passively memorizing lists, make words pop off the page by adding emotion, multisensory experiences, context, contrast, and spaced exposure.

Next time you struggle to remember a word, ask yourself: How can I make this more salient? The more you engage with words in a way that matters to you, the faster you’ll absorb them. And it's a lot more fun, too!

Happy diving!