How to remember Spanish words (and keep them)

Spanish is one of the friendlier languages for an English speaker. It is spelled the way it sounds, and a good part of its vocabulary looks familiar. The hard part is the same as in any language: getting thousands of new words to stay. Here are five things that help, each backed by research rather than by a hunch.

1. Start with the words that do the most work

A small number of words make up most of what people say. Mark Davies counted a 20-million-word collection of spoken and written Spanish and found that the 1000 most frequent words cover about 88% of the words in speech and 76% to 80% of the words in writing. The first 3000 cover about 94% of speech and 88% to 90% of writing (Davies, 2005).

He counted dictionary forms, so hablar stands for hablo, hablamos and hablarás too. The lesson is simple: for your first few thousand words, a list ordered by frequency beats a list ordered by topic, because “to want” and “already” will come up far more often than “giraffe”. For the full picture, we wrote about how many words you need to understand a language.

2. Collect the words you nearly know already

Spanish and English share a large stock of words from Latin and French. Importante, posible, hospital, animal and chocolate need almost no learning, only an ear for how they are pronounced. Spotting them is free progress.

Watch for the false friends, though. Embarazada means pregnant, not embarrassed. A librería is a bookshop; a library is a biblioteca. And éxito is a success, not a way out. When a word looks familiar but the sentence stops making sense, check it.

3. Give every other word a hook

For the words with no family resemblance, the best-studied technique is the keyword method. You find a word in your own language that sounds like the new word, then picture the two meanings doing something together. Richard Atkinson and Michael Raugh tested it at Stanford with Russian. Their example: zvonok means bell and sounds a little like “oak”, so you picture an oak tree hung with little bells instead of acorns. In their experiment, 52 students learned 120 Russian words. On a test the day after the last lesson, the students given keywords recalled 72% of the words, against 46% for students who studied however they liked, and they were still ahead about six weeks later (Atkinson & Raugh, 1975).

A few things make a hook work:

• Build it from the sound, not the spelling. Spanish vowels are short and clear; say the word aloud before you look for a keyword.
• Make the two things interact. A duck next to a pot is forgettable. A duck wearing the pot is not.
• Land on the meaning. The picture has to lead back to “duck”, not just to the sound “pot”.
• Learn nouns with their article. Store el pato and la mesa, not pato and mesa, or you will have to look the gender up again later.

4. Test yourself instead of rereading

Rereading a list feels productive. It mostly is not. Jeffrey Karpicke and Henry Roediger had students learn 40 Swahili words with their English translations. Students who kept being tested on every word, even words they already knew, recalled about 80% a week later. Students who stopped being tested on a word once they had got it right recalled 36% or 33%, even when they went on rereading it. The most striking part: every group predicted it would remember about half. You cannot feel from the inside which kind of practice is working (Karpicke & Roediger, 2008).

So cover the answer and try to recall it before you check. Start from Spanish to English. Once that is easy, go the other way, from English to Spanish, which is harder and is what you need to speak.

5. Space the reviews out

Hermann Ebbinghaus, who first measured forgetting, found that most of it happens fast: an hour after learning a list, he needed about half the original effort to learn it again, while after that the loss slowed right down (Ebbinghaus, 1885). A review of 317 experiments found that spreading study out beats cramming it together, and that the longer you want to remember something, the longer the best gap between reviews (Cepeda et al., 2006).

In practice: see a new word again the next day, then after a few days, then a week, then a few weeks. Each time, try to recall it before you look.

A ten-minute routine

Put the five together and a day looks like this. Reviews first, because those words are the ones about to slip. Then a handful of new words from the top of a frequency list, each with a hook or a note that it is a cognate. Recall before you check, every time. Ten minutes every day suits this better than one long session a week, because the reviews arrive when they are due.

How associlang does it

Our Spanish course for English speakers is built on exactly this. The words come in order of how often they are really used, up to 3000. Each one has native-accent audio, a picture and one sentence that links how it sounds to what it means, and a word you already know, like chocolate, is marked as one. Then each word comes back just before you would forget it, with questions that get harder as it sticks: recognise it, hear it, then find it from its meaning.