How to remember Spanish vocabulary
Spanish gives English speakers a head start. How to use it, which words to learn first, and memory techniques that make Spanish words stick.
Spanish is one of the friendliest languages for English speakers to build a vocabulary in. Thousands of words look familiar, it’s written the way it’s said, and the most common words get you a long way. The two things that slip most are the words that look nothing like English, and each noun’s gender.
Use the words you already know
Many Spanish words share a root with English: la información, el hospital, la idea, posible. These are called cognates, and a few spelling patterns turn hundreds of English words into Spanish ones:
| English ending | Spanish ending | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| -tion | -ción | nation → la nación, information → la información |
| -ty | -dad | city → la ciudad, university → la universidad |
| -ous | -oso | famous → famoso, delicious → delicioso |
| -ly | -mente | rapidly → rápidamente, finally → finalmente |
Watch out for false friends: embarazada means pregnant, actual means current, and librería is a bookshop.
Learn the most common words first
The most frequently used words cover a huge share of everyday Spanish: ser, estar, tener, hacer, ir, and the small words that hold sentences together. Learn those first and you’ll hear them in nearly every conversation, which gives you practice without trying.
Always learn nouns with el or la
Every noun is masculine or feminine, and it changes the words around it. Learn la casa, with its article, and the gender comes free. A few ending rules cover most nouns; the rest are worth learning with a colour or a picture. See how to remember Spanish noun gender.
Make the hard words memorable
For words that look nothing like English, use a memory hook: an English phrase that sounds like the word, pictured with its meaning. Mesa (table) sounds like “messy”, so picture your kitchen table buried under a messy pile of plates. That’s the keyword method, one of the best-studied memory tricks for foreign words (Atkinson & Raugh, 1975).
Make the scene yours: set it somewhere you know, and put yourself in it. Things that relate to you are among the easiest to recall (Symons & Johnson, 1997). More in memory hooks.
Learn verbs in a phrase
Spanish verbs change for every person and tense. Learn each new verb in a short phrase you’d actually say, like tengo hambre (I’m hungry) or ¿me puedes ayudar? (can you help me?), and meet the other forms in sentences as you go. See sentence cards.
Review on a schedule
Test yourself on each word just before you’d forget it, at gaps that grow from days to months (Cepeda et al., 2006). See how spaced repetition works.
How Flashfriend does it
Flashfriend teaches the most useful Spanish words first. Every noun comes with its article and its gender colour: el words red, la words blue, on the word and in its picture. For each word you pick a place you know and a scene from a phrase that sounds like it, and Flashfriend paints it. Every word has audio, and you’re tested on each one just before you’d forget it. Once you know enough words, sentences with one new word follow, and grammar comes one pattern at a time.
Read more about Flashfriend for Spanish.
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