Tennis Vocab
Learning Spanish: How to Collect, Remember and Expand Spanish Vocab
Whether you are a total beginner, or advanced speaker, expanding your Spanish vocab is really important. This article provides a useful method to help you find, organise and eventually remember new Spanish vocab.
Firstly it is important to get yourself a well organised Spanish vocab book which you can add to whenever you come across new vocab- one way to do this is to create a word processing document although some people prefer having a book to write in and revise from. I would however suggest that all your Spanish learning can now be done online so an online vocab book is a logical next step.
Organising the book means separating pages into certain themes – for beginners this could be the very basics such as colours, parts of the body, numbers etc. However as your vocabulary improves new sections will be required – these would include vocab topics such as the environment and more difficult adjectives such as those for personality / human appearance / object appearance etc.
You need to ensure that these vocab areas are specific enough to be useful and this is to say certainly no larger than 50 words once you have mastered the entire vocab for that topic. To do this you could split categories in to different more specific sections as you improve – for instance you could split sport into football (such as vocab for goal, referee, pitch, stadium etc), tennis and then more obscure sports. Don’t be afraid to repeat vocab over different sections as the more you see a Spanish word the more likely it will stay in your brain.
What I have found very clear from my experience learning Spanish is that when it comes to learning and revising vocab it really helps to be looking at related vocabulary within which you can make relevant links between words. It is useful therefore to use the computer to organise all these sections, to move words between sections and to group related phrases.
Next you are left to collect the words to fill up your vocab book. For some categories there are excellent resources online at websites such as Spanish Dict, Real Spanish and Rocket Spanish – they offer collections of vocab already divided into relevant sections. Also these sites offer great interactive exercises to help you remember new words. However you should still make a note of every word – to memorise vocab successfully takes more than guessing the word on Hangman and you will have to go back regularly to cover old Spanish vocab.
Spanish Dict is also very useful if you are finding new words whilst reading Spanish material. Make sure you understand the exact context of the word before adding to the relevant topic in your vocab book. The next stage you need to follow is to use the dictionary tool to find synonyms for the word – these are often listed inside the definition however a thesaurus could also be useful. Finally think of words you don’t already know relating to the topic – in this way your vocab collection will grow very quickly and you will possess the words to speak in depth around the topics covered.
My final advice involves the learning and memorising process itself and is probably the most important. I recommend revising vocab with a range of methods – try writing phrases (it is thought writing a word in 3 different sentences gives us a good chance of remembering it); repeating the word over and over to yourself and testing your memory, and also to play interactive Spanish vocab games and exercises.
One product I’d really recommend is the Rocket Spanish MegaVocab tool which allows you to input your own Spanish words (directly from your vocab book) into their software. This gives the chance to revise the words you have found using an interactive and mentally stimulating memory tool. There is a good review of Rocket Spanish available at http://topspanishtips.weebly.com/the-3-best-spanish-courses-online.html .
About the Author
http://www.topspanishtips.weebly.com is a collection of the best free Spanish resources on the internet. If you’re learning Spanish from beginner to advanced level we provide those websites to help improve grammar and vocab, reading and writing and even you’re listening and speaking online.
