The 3 shoe boxes is a commonly known, effective method to learn new words and making passive knowledge active.

Originally, it is based on 3 shoe boxes and works as follows. You put small pieces of papers (with a word in your own native language on the one side and the meaning of the word on the other) into the first box. You close the box and shake it well to have the papers mixed (to make sure they always come in a different order). Then you start to get the papers one by one out of the box. If you know the meaning of the word you took, you put it in the second box, if not, you put it back in the first one. You repeat this, with the second and then the third box, until all the words are taken. Two or three days later you take the whole box again and do the same.

By this method, a word only reaches the third box (and finally get out of it) if you really learned it. We implemented this methodology of learning new words to PPC and also developed some word lists (like irregular words, etc.). You can also find an Excel sheet on our webpage, that helps you to create wordlist files for 3ShoeBoxes from your existing wordlists.

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