How to improve memory

Could someone please help me on how to improve my memory ?
I find great difficulty in remembering vocabulary, names and things like that...
Do you have any suggestions?

Research on the brain's amazing capacity to record information for a lifetime, has suggested that memory is just a collection of isolated bits.
Short-term memory can hold about seven bits of information before either losing it forvever or transferring it to long-term memory for permanent storage. Research also says that if you attend to something for eight seconds, it probably gets stored away as a permenant chunk of the memory. If you study something for more than eight seconds, the brain may store the information in more than one place.
Short-term memory appears to be more auditory than visual, while long-term memory can be both. Even when you read, to hold what you have read in short term memory, you translate it and record it as sounds. Short term memory aslo seems to operate better when something is spoken versus being written.
Emotions also play a part in memory. Materials learned when you are happy is better recalled when you are happy. This happens because memory is closely tied to the limbic system; the brain's seat of emotions.
One technique to help remember things is to 'tag' memories. It is as if your brain is a desk with 100 billion 'drawers' in it. When you put your sweetheart's phone number in one of these 'drawers' you must somehow label it - perhaps by tying an imaginary red scarf to the handle - so that you can find it when you want it. The two basic memory techniques are visualisation and association.
I hope this helps a bit as this is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many theories and ideas but the best way of remembering is through association.

I read on net a technique to memorise vocabulary with two different ways.

1. Imagine places to put different sort of words. For instance, a public park to words related to things, a theatre to words related to feelings, a mountain range to words related to science.

2. Create a story with the new words you are learning. For instance, if you want to fix in mind 'painstaking', 'frightened' and 'hastily' you can imagine a park where a grandmother is doing a painstaking job on cross-stitch when suddenly she gets frightened by a boy who passes running hastily.

Also I was told to relate the sound of the word you want to fix in mind with something.

All of that is about learning a language but about fixing in mind musical works, I have other ways, I'll tell you next post.

Thank you all for your help. I will try what you suggested. However, if there are any more suggestions I would be happy to know.

Really nice suggestion but the problem is that I can speak 3 foreign languages ( english, french and a bit of spanish) so when I try to remember a word I get mixed up. This is serious when e.g I am having a lesson, the student asks a word and I can't answer quickly. I have to find a way not to forget vocabulary and I do not know how