Spanish: 1,000 Words in 2 Months
Accelerate your learning through visual mnemonics
Hey all! One thing I’m currently obsessed with is learning Spanish. After a couple of tidbits from the week, I’ll share a great trick I learned to accelerate my learning that doesn’t just apply to learning languages.
🎼 Music I’m Loving
“Experiencia Religiosa” by Enrique Iglesias. His slow songs are both musically beautiful and are another great way to learn Spanish.
⏱️ Framework: Pay Yourself First
“If you try to find time for your most valued activities by first dealing with all the other important demands on your time, in the hope that there’ll be some left over at the end, you’ll be disappointed.” - Oliver Burkeman, 4 Thousand Weeks
Spanish: 1,000 Words in 2 Months
As I go about my fourth year of learning Spanish, the biggest thing I’ve realized is that the limiting factor in learning any language is not grammar but vocabulary.
Think about it—with knowledge of basic grammar, you have the tools to properly construct a sentence. What defines how good you are at Spanish, then, is your ability to express yourself, which fundamentally involves an extensive vocabulary.
Below I’ll share my learning strategy that has allowed me to learn 1,000 words in two months, on top of all my other school work.
Accelerated Learning: Picture Mnemonics
Use flashcards. I’m a huge fan of Anki, which I use daily to maximize my memory’s capacity.
On the front side, put the word you’re learning in English. Because when learning a language we’re effectively translating from English, we need to be able to recall a word, not just recognize it.
Learn as many cognates (similar-looking words) as you can, but for others, I use the following method that I discovered from Tim Ferriss.
Let’s start with an example:
Sheep in Spanish is oveja
Oveja kind of looks like “oval”
The goal: when you think of the word sheep, you remember this image you created of a sheep with an ovular body.
In other words, whatever language you’re learning, the word in the foreign language will look like something in English. Use that English to create a sort of visual mnemonic.
Always include pictures on the back. You might be able to find some crazy pictures that actually match the visual mnemonic you create:
In Spanish, frambuesa means raspberry. Naturally, this word looks like “frame” in English, so I envisioned a picture frame of raspberries and Googled it. Cool, right?
A Few Other Tips
Speak as much as you can. Conversing with my professor in office hours, talking to myself, or singing songs have hugely accelerated my progress. Three Spanish lectures per week is absolutely not sufficient to learn Spanish, both from a speaking and vocabulary perspective.
According to Tim Ferriss, if you devoted a few hours a day to learning the most useful words in Spanish, you could easily learn 100-300 words per day.
And if you do choose these words wisely—words that are personally relevant to you and that help you express any idea—you likely can be functionally fluent in 2-3 months.
Of course, that also includes basic grammar. Here’s 13 sentences Ferriss uses to give anyone a firm grasp of the fundamentals of grammar:
As Kevin Jubbal said, we humans are visual creatures: through our evolution over millions of years, we’ve only had written language for a small percentage of our existence.
So leverage this. It can be applied to many things outside of learning a language.
Now, at least you learned what a sheep and raspberry is in Spanish. But how do you say oval or frame in Spanish?
The game continues. As my Spanish teacher embodies, do Spanish for the Love of It.
Happy learning,
Baxter
To view this on my personal website, click here.
Cover Photo by Daniel Prado on Unsplash