The Witchcraft Of Spanish Vocabulary

The very first step to conquering a language is to tame its vocabulary. And sadly, that’s the part that puts off most novice learners because memorizing strange-sounding words is too darn boring! A never-ending chant of rote rehearsal and a nervous prayer can see you through an upcoming test, but the process just won’t cut it if your goal is to actually use the language in the street. It’s a mystery how this incredibly inefficient method has survived this long and still continues to be perpetuated by schools and educators around the world. So is there any nirvana around this assault of monotony in our miserable lives? Anything that could make learning foreign words less painful?

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that rote memorization doesn’t work at all. It does and has for all of us who have ever learned and mastered a second language. The problem is it’s too demanding to be practically viable in the long run. When you repeat a word-meaning pair a few million times, you forcefully condition your brain to map two completely unrelated (sound-wise) terms in a way that the mention of one instantly brings out the other. That’s how you recall stuff. But at what cost? You’re not making any real connection between the words this way and that’s why you still fumble to recall them most of the times during a live conversation. And that’s why the foreign word learned this way forever remains foreign to you because you haven’t “familiarized” yourself to it the way you’re familiar with its English counterpart. It will never become natural in your mind. So, while you can speak both English and Spanish, you can “think” only in English. The result? You’re fluent in English and not in Spanish.

Don’t have dictionaries for breakfast

Cramming up these tomes is an surefire recipe for failure
Photo credit: Eliazar Parra Cardenas licensed CC BY 2.0

Luckily, life’s not really as grim as I made it sound above. It doesn’t have to. Throughout this site, there are dozens of articles that discuss wacky ways to build a Spanish vocabulary. But before we get there, it’s important to establish just how much is to be done. How many words must you learn before you start Skyping with the Latina you met on that language exchange forum? The number will surprise you to no end. You certainly don’t have to chow down an entire dictionary – that’s neither possible, nor necessary. You don’t have to memorize 10,000 in order to start making sense of what the native speakers are on about. Not even 5,000. The right answer is a measly 2,000 words! That’s the total number of words that make up more than 80% of all spoken and written Spanish you’ll encounter in a place where only Spanish is spoken. How’s that for some perspective? Now you know how many, but which ones? Of course it can’t be just a random selection of Spanish. You can’t just open up the María Moliner (the Webster’s of Spanish dictionaries) and cram up the first 2,000 words – that obviously won’t cut it. This selection of 2,000 words that matter can be referred to as a “core vocabulary.” Every language has it. And the way a given word makes it to this core vocabulary is called a “word-frequency study.” In not-so-fancy terms, it’s just a study of which words are used more often than the others in all spoken and written communications.

Make history work for you

So, now we know how many words to learn and which ones to learn. What remains now is the reason we’re all on this site: How to have them down. There are two major tricks up our sleeves. One is etymology or, in other words, word history. Yes, we’ve all had our “meh” moments with etymology as kids but that’s because it wasn’t relevant back then. It didn’t have any practical purpose in our lives. Now it does, and we’ll see how. Rote memorization takes an impractical amount of efforts simply because the link between the foreign word and its English counterpart is not established in that method – it’s simply forced upon our brains. Etymology is one way to address this issue. Since both Spanish and English (to a large extent) share a common Latin heritage, the field is set for etymology. Any two words, okay most of them leastwise, that share a common past can be bridged together using etymology. Take, for example, pared. That’s Spanish for wall. The two words look as related as a spider and a cellphone. Let’s see how we can use a bit of history to build a bridge between the two. Pared descends from Latin pariete. And pariete comes from an ancient Proto-Indo-European root that gives us sparri of Old Icelandic and sparro of Old High German. All these words translate into wall and still don’t sound any more familiar than pared. Not yet. But like several old Germanic words, sparro also happened to enter English as the verb support. Now that sounds familiar, doesn’t it? And it’s completely reasonable because a wall does offer support to the structure, right? So, now you can think of pared as the thing that supports other things and that’ll lead you to wall. Pared does kind of sound like the second half of support, after all. Doesn’t sound so alien anymore, does it? That’s how etymology works.

Link ’n’ learn

But etymology isn’t a universal panacea. In many cases, words have evolved so badly that they have little left in common with what they began as. Those are times you can build your own bridges. That’s where your personal creativity and imagination kicks in. Let’s call this “word-association.” Words don’t have to be authentically related in form in order for us to link them up. To give you an example, take pato. That’s Spanish for duck. Etymology is not very useful here because pato has Arabic origins and English never had anything to do with that language. So let’s connect the two words in our imagination. Picture a gang of noisy ducks duck-footing about on your patio. Or, to make it even wackier (the wackier the image, the better it sticks to memory), imagine having tea with Scrooge McDuck in your patio. Trust me, it won’t be an easy one to forget. Now, pato will always remind you of patio which will lead you to the stingy duck you were enjoying the high-tea with out there. That’s the power of imagination. How many repetitions would it have taken you to memorize that one?

Repeat after me

If you must rely on repetitions, make sure you use it as a supplement and not the sole learning technique. Repetitions are good for reviews, not for learning. And the best way to do those reviews is to follow a scientifically proven pattern. Subsequent reviews should be spaced out in the way that maximizes retention costing the least amount of efforts. That’s where automated “spaced repetition systems” (in layman terms, flashcards) come in. In this time and age where everything from eating to taking a dump (okay this one might be a stretch) is going digital, there are quite a few apps available that can take care of the spacing for us. We can call them digital flashcards. If blackjack and poker can go digital, why can’t flashcards? Luckily for us, most of them are free and open source. The two biggest names in this area are Memrise^® and Anki^®, the latter being easily the more popular of the two. So, the strategy is simple – identify the 2,000 words of core Spanish vocabulary, add them to an Anki^® deck, and review them as the app dictates. And before you do that, familiarize yourself with each of those 2,000 words using either of the two methods discussed above. Life is just that simple, really.

The big red book of vocabulary-wizardry

Rote memorization can never be fun, nor effective

Since this too might sound like a lot of work to a lot of us, I’ve brought it all together in this new 1,443-page behemoth called “Spanish Vocabulary Bible: Memory Tricks for the Lazy Learner” so that you can focus more on absorbing Spanish and less on figuring out how to. This book lists out the entire core vocabulary and offers a detailed explanation of each word’s meaning along with at least one trick (using mnemonics, etymology, or word-association) to memorize it in an instant and without any repetitions. And that’s not all; it also goes on to give two contextual sentences in both Spanish as well as English for each vocabulary entry so that you learn words as they are used in context and not in a vacuum as most phrasebooks would have you do. The book also comes with a ready-made deck of digital flashcards that you can just load into your Anki^® and start the reviews right away. In a nutshell, everything is spoon-fed to you ensuring you have no ground for procrastination anymore. I admit the book isn’t free but is 20 bucks too steep a price to pay for something that has your back as far as the single most daunting aspect of learning Spanish is concerned? I’ll let you decide for yourself.