Building a Large Spanish Vocabulary

Someone might ask the question, "How long do I have to work on my Spanish vocabulary?". Well, as someone who's been speaking Spanish as a second language for about 20 years, my answer is never. As Spanish speakers, we always want to be interested in building new words and phrases into our vocabularies. Getting better at Spanish is challenging and keeps it interesting. Anyway, that's the goal of this lesson -- to give you tools and ideas on how to build a very large vocabulary of Spanish words.

Words with the speaker symbol have been recorded by a native Spanish speaker.

Speak and Write New Words

For folks starting out learning Spanish, a great way to build a huge vocabulary quickly is by learning lists. Lists of colors, days of the week, months of the year, seasons, hobbies, body parts, household items, car parts, planets, -- any list you can get your hands on is a good list to learn.

Cognates

Even before you begin studying Spanish, you already know a lot of Spanish words amigo. Use cognates to your advantage and increase your vocabulary -- you can get more information on cognates and some examples on this page about cognates.

Read, Read, Read

There is Spanish reading material for beginner, intermediate, and advanced Spanish readers. And reading is one of the best ways to increase your vocabulary. Newspapers, magazines, fiction books, non-fiction books -- Read what interests you. Think about what you like to read in English...Chances are very good you can find Spanish material about what interests you.

Take Notes

I'm a big fan of compulsive note-taking -- although I work with computers a lot, I still like to write notes to myself with old fashioned pen and paper -- so it comes easy to me to write down a new Spanish word I hear, and later look it up and memorize its meaning. If you can do it, this is a great habit to get into for building Spanish vocabulary.

To Remember it, Write it out