In today's globalization, English as the common language of international communication, its importance is self-evident. Especially in the higher education stage, the improvement of English ability has a profound impact on students’ academic development and future career. However, college students face many challenges in English vocabulary learning, such as large vocabulary, high difficulty in memory, and steep forgetting curve. Traditional learning methods are often difficult to meet the learning needs of individuals, resulting in unsatisfactory learning results. Therefore, it is particularly necessary to build a personalized English vocabulary learning system with the help of modern technology means, especially the data mining algorithm. MATLAB simulation shows that the data mining algorithm is better than the English vocabulary learning efficiency and mobile learning accuracy of learners under certain evaluation criteria Traditional English learning mode.