Memorising a word and its one-line gloss produces recognition without the ability to use it, because using a word requires knowing its register, its collocations and its pronunciation as well as its meaning. What works is learning words in structures — with their opposites, with the category above them, with all of their senses, and with their stress pattern — and reading enough in one subject that the vocabulary repeats until it sticks.
Why lists fail even when you remember them
Knowing a word means knowing several things at once: what it means, how formal it is, which words it appears beside, which grammatical frames it takes, and how it is said. A list gives you the first and nothing else.
The result is a familiar failure. You recognise the word when you read it and never produce it when you write, because producing it requires the four facts the list left out. Recognition vocabulary and production vocabulary are different sizes for everyone, and list-learning grows only the first.
It also mislearns register. A word met once in a gloss carries no signal about whether it belongs in a work email, and the characteristic sound of vocabulary learned from lists is a formal word dropped into a casual sentence.
Learn in structures, not in lists
Each of these attaches a new word to something you already hold, which is the whole mechanism. The corpus is organised to make all four of them easy.