I've never been good at memorizing vocabulary. As a child, I would carry my mini-Collins dictionary and read it on the school bus trying to memorize some words I didn't understand —like abbot or abbey; I lacked context to grasp their meaning. Other words had several meanings, and I was fascinated by how those meanings still felt connected —like fly.

Years later, when I started teaching, I realized that many learners share the same difficulty I have: we can easily understand the overall concept and the relations between meanings, but struggle to memorize isolated words and definitions. Most traditional methods were built around lists, which for me were as useful as trying to memorize a dictionary —I need to see how things connect, not just repeat them— and I need linguistic samples to see how they are used in real-life contexts.

Another thing I noticed is that students with a really good memory can learn their vocabulary lists but have difficulty using those words naturally, so they also need examples to see how words are used even if they can ace any vocabulary exam.

​

Today there are far more memory-based methods using mnemonic rules, storytelling, imagery, flashcards, and even sensory techniques involving taste or smell or explanations that try to be so memorable they border on traumatic. Yet I haven’t seen a method so far that connects semantics, pragmatics, and morphology the way N-Opuses do.