Most people learning a second language sort of take the mother tongue words and their target words and go over them again and again in their mind to try and remember them. What you need to do is realize that everything you know is an image inside your mind, its feelings. We tend to remember visual things really more effectively than other things. So if you can create a very vivid visual memory in your head and connect that to the new word that you're trying to remember, that can make a big difference in your ability to recall those words.