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Ask HN: Any tips to improve word recall?
3 points by kypro on Feb 26, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments
I'm not sure how normal this is, but I think almost exclusively in abstract representations of concepts in my head and rarely ever use words.

This means while I often feel I have a good understanding of something and everything makes sense in my mind when I go to explain something I then realise I don't know what things are called or how to describe what's in my head.

The issue is mainly in the recall of words when I'm trying to communicate since this is when it becomes a noticeable problem – but I suppose I may not store words to begin with. I tend to try to understanding things by visualising them because I struggle to conceptualising from a verbal description of something. An example here would be that I rarely ever read developer docs and instead just read an overview then pull the code and work out how to use it.

This holds me back significantly in my career. I find I'm extremely capable, but unable to demonstrate that capability verbally. Given that people can only base their opinions of your abilities from your ability to demonstrate them it means people often underestimate me professionally.

My dad's side of the family all struggle with this. They also find it very hard to explain things and their sentences are filled with a lot of "ums" while they're thinking about how to describe what's in their head in words.

Any advice would be amazing, especially if you've had success with this yourself. Not sure it's relevant but I am autistic. However, I suspect I have some kind of speech issue in addition to this because not all autistic people have issues speaking, and some have brilliant vocabularies.



I’m also neurodivergent and have learned to overcome this problem by associating the sound of the word/how the word looks like with a particular picture or concept in my mind. I think this is how babies learn language, by relating the contextual application of the word to its sound and tone. So maybe repeating the word while thinking of a related image or sense which is easy to recall during the appropriate conversational context will help. Alternatively, it might help to have “pre-set” phrases in your head to reduce the amount of pauses you make. This is something children learn through reading a lot when they’re little, which allows them to intuitively pick up the author’s sentence structure and colloquialisms (you might notice a child starts talking in the manner of a long and wordy book they’ve just read). However, the degree of difficulty of this depends on your natural born verbal reasoning abilities. So if you’re finding it harder to pick up sentence structure and incorporate it into your own speech, it just means you need to try a bit harder. Something which helps is attempting to imitate the style of the author through writing– as you consciously replicate their choices in diction, you learn new vocabulary or new literary techniques and actively incorporate them in your writing. Hope this helps!


Something I've been doing recently that has really helped me find the right word faster is using flashcards.

One side will say "Explain the concept of x" and the other side be a paragraph or so of the concept.

I use both sides, so I will look at the abstract and try and remember the "x" naming word for it.

I don't think how you do, however I do often learn things in my own way, describing things internally using the "wrong" terms, This helps me link my internal thought processes to correct terms faster.




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