It's difficult to single out the most effective strategy because people differ in how they learn. If you depend on vision rather than your ear you might prefer to see the text rather than hear it. This is obviously a very simple example and probably the most common one but it does its job. What makes learning effective is using *various* strategies that suit your personal characteristics. What works for me, doesn't have to work for others. The strategies I choose (consciously or not) may change over time and to be honest I find it difficult to track them all!
When I was much younger I was crazy about graphic representation. I can easily recall a picture of a kitchen that I was given to learn vocabulary. I was to colour it and sign the objects I could see - spoons on the left, forks in the drawer, pans, pots, plates, a socket, and a spider hanging from the ceiling.
Using action to 'show' words was also helpful, so all kinds of guessing games where somebody would jump, run, crawl (particularly nice with verbs) etc. were most welcome.
Later I also did some semantic and syntactic grouping (categories, topics and word families – verbs, nouns etc.). The latter helped me learn affixes as well as spelling!
beautiful beautifully. It made me dedicate a couple of pages to my favourite mistakes, too e.g. *
suprise instead of
surprise,
*tomorow instead of
tomorrow,
*obssesion instead of
obsession,
ocassion instead of
occasion etc.
Cards with words were also very helpful in my case. I cut up a piece of paper into small squares and put a Polish word on one side and a corresponding English word on the other together with an exemplary sentence. This worked great as I was focusing on one word at a time and I could test myself. However, this method is rather time-consuming, so you can't always make use of it, but you can be picky about what you put on such cards.
Now, they've made me think of revising. Vital. Revise – 5 min. break, revise – 10 min. break, revise 1h break, hours, days, weeks etc. You have to be persistent with this one and make sure your will doesn't grow fat and lazy :-?. Tough.
I learnt English alphabet in the form of a song (not the one most English children learn though) and I swear until very recently I couldn't say it any other way but with the melody ringing in my head. If I tried to do it without it, I was getting lost somewhere around H. :-| Embarrassing.
Speaking of which, embarrassment is a very effective memory strategy. I remember how I was once chatting with a friend and I wanted to tease him about a spelling mistake he made, so I went '
*how embarassing!'. At least he had a laugh. I can assure you I haven't made that mistake since.
When I can't remember the pronunciation of a given word I sometimes look for a similar sounding word in my native language [e.g. I'd associate
vulture with
walczę (I fight)]. And when I struggled to pronounce Mediterranean (eh, I still have to check how to spell it), I found a weather forecast and repeated it a number of times after the model. Then, I was trying to retrieve the correct pronunciation whenever I could, for example walking down the street.
What else, dun dun dun. Oh! I've learnt a lot just singing songs – the pronunciation of single words, copying the rhythm, connected speech, accent, it's quite nice if you're into singing in the first place. *And* if people around you are understanding enough. ;-)
I couldn't forget about reading in English; it has helped me immensely. It just brings your focus to collocations, everyday language (depending on what you read), vivid phrases, new vocabulary, synonyms. Reading labels on products can teach you a lot, too. Generally speaking, resourcing (using target language reference materials) works wonders.
Actually, I find using this forum very helpful. When reading native speakers' posts, not only do I pay attention to what they write, but also how they write it. Not because I expect it to be uber-correct but because it has this natural flow to it. And of course you get to learn new phrases, my most recent one is 'in flux'.
Phew, my collection of thoughts ends here for now. It really IS a broad subject.