Or: why spaced repetition works and which tool to actually use
If you’ve ever memorised a word list the night before a lesson and lost half of it by the following week, that’s not a discipline problem; it’s the forgetting curve, first documented by Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885. New information decays fast unless you review it right before you’d otherwise lose it. Spaced repetition systems (SRS) exploit this: they schedule each word’s next review for the moment you’re about to forget it, which is a far better use of your time than re-reading the same list daily.
For C1 vocabulary specifically, this matters more than at lower levels, because what you’re actually learning isn’t individual words but collocations, register, and the fine distinctions between near-synonyms: ‘burning ambition’, not ‘hot ambition’; knowing when ‘adept’ beats ‘skilled’. That’s not the kind of thing you absorb by staring at a list. It needs active recall, ideally in context, spaced out over time.
Which tool, in practice:
Anki is the one I’d point most C1 students toward. It’s free, open-source, and completely customisable; you can build cards that ask you to produce a collocation, spot a dependent preposition, or distinguish a word from its closest synonym, rather than just matching a definition. The interface is genuinely ugly and the learning curve is real, but for advanced vocabulary the flexibility is worth it.
Memrise trades some of that flexibility for native-speaker video and a more polished, gamified feel, a reasonable choice if Anki’s blank-slate approach is off-putting, though the useful content sits behind a subscription.
Clozemaster is worth mentioning for one specific reason: it drills vocabulary entirely through fill-in-the-blank sentences, which forces contextual rather than isolated recall; good as a supplement, weak as your only tool since you can’t build your own cards.
A few things that actually make the difference regardless of tool: keep your cards specific (word plus your own example sentence plus its collocations, not just a bare definition), add new words in small batches rather than fifty at once, and review daily even if it’s only ten minutes; little and often beats occasional marathons. And don’t panic when you forget a card; getting it wrong and reviewing it again is the mechanism working as intended, not a failure.
Sources
Ebbinghaus, H. (1885). Über das Gedächtnis (translated 1913 as Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology), the original study establishing the forgetting curve.
Murre, J. M. J., & Dros, J. (2015). Replication and analysis of Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve. PLOS ONE, 10(7), e0120644, a modern replication confirming Ebbinghaus’ original findings still hold.