# Learning language vocabulary **URL:** \ **Category:** Language Learning\ **Tags:** vocabulary\ **Created:** [August 4, 2020, 11:27pm UTC](https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/learning-language-vocabulary/53995 "2020-08-04T23:27:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 4
**Author:** ![bjoern.gumboldt](https://forum.artofmemory.com/user_avatar/forum.artofmemory.com/bjoern.gumboldt/32/16747_2.png) [@bjoern.gumboldt](https://forum.artofmemory.com/u/bjoern.gumboldt)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2020, 7:01pm UTC](https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/learning-language-vocabulary/53995/4 "2020-08-05T19:01:18Z")
> [@AussieTraveller](#): > > Rightly or wrongly I’m going to start by learning vocabulary. There’s nothing wrong with that at all… just don’t let great be the enemy of good. You didn’t give any timeline when you say… > [@AussieTraveller](#): > > The 100 most common words to start with, then the next 100 and so on. …in fact, I’d support that 100%; however, going at a pace of 100/day for one week. That will give you 700 words without you having to worry about long terms retention too much. Obviously, you’ll lose a few along the way and end up with only 500 give or take. Especially, if you reuse the same 100 locations each day. > [@AussieTraveller](#): > > All that remains now to make a start is to decide how to go about learning this mass of **unrelated** words. Memory palace with one example sentence per word. The example sentence is there to make the words a little less “unrelated.” > [@AussieTraveller](#): > > Obviously at any time I can switch to some method that may have caught my attention, but I’ll be making some positive progress in the meantime, something I haven’t done so far. Language is all a matter of input. You’re looking at it from a lexis (vocabulary), grammar, and phonetics point of view. However, you should also consider the two receptive skills: listening and reading; and the two productive skills: speaking and writing. In the end, the 500 some odd words you’ve learned the first week is enough to start watching Spanish tv shows and start learning phrases rather than words that way. The situation (tv is better than just audio) will help you to understand new words through context. > [@Readerly](#): > > The strategy can give you a good start, but just so know, a lot of the most common words are just different forms of the same verb. @Readerly has a very good point here; however, most frequency dictionaries don’t even list the words like that. You get “to **be** ” and it will not also have “I **am** ” and “you **are**.” In fact, to make that a bit messier in Spanish… you’ll have “ **ser** ” and “ **estar** ” as part of the Top 20 in terms of frequency. They both mean “to be” by the way… grammar, as @Readerly suggests, will help you to some extend but there is obviously also idiomatic usage of words. The other two you’ll find in the Top 20 are “ **por** ” and “ **para** ”… both meaning “ **for**.” That’s basically what I mean by “don’t let great be the enemy of good” and try and learn 1,000 loci for your first 1,000 words. You will not know when to use “ser” instead of “estar” without knowing some grammar, which you can pick up intuitively though by watching Spanish tv (read: YouTube). So I agree with @elswithers as far as… > [@elswithers](#): > > One of my peeves about this forum is that people want to use memory palaces for anything and everything, when not always useful or appropriate. …and whilst this is mostly true, SRS and memory palaces are not mutually exclusive. Like I said, put 100 words in there day one. Review end of day one and beginning of day two and then override the same loci. Again, review at night, review in the morning, put next 100 words in the same loci. Don’t even worry about ghosting because that works in your favor… you don’t remember one of the words, who cares. > [@AussieTraveller](#): > > What think ye? I think you forgot one crucial thing… English and Spanish share a common ancestor and there are in fact 29 rules that you could learn to easily know your first 1,000 Spanish words in a couple of hours. I’m always surprised that nobody knows that… 1066 Battle of Hastings… yes, sure that is technically French and not Spanish, but in the end, both of those are just pretty bad Latin… [https://research.steinhardt.nyu.edu/scmsAdmin/media/users/nbm3/EngSpCognates.pdf](https://research.steinhardt.nyu.edu/scmsAdmin/media/users/nbm3/EngSpCognates.pdf) ps: I’ve taught English as a foreign language in Spain before (A2/B1 level) and they were always confused as to why nobody’s ever mentioned this list of rules to them before. My advice: learn the 29 rules in this list to get your first 500-1,000 words. Takes about a day… or make it a weekend for all I care. Do the first 700 words from a frequency dictionary in a week and then switch to tv for another week. Start reading some magazines or whatnot for the second “receptive skill” and eventually have a look at some grammar rules. I think we can agree that zero, first, second, third, and mixed conditional (in English) you can get from just vocabulary. I’m not sure how much Spanish you want to learn, but conditionals are done in A2 already when teaching English. That’s it… the rest is just learning from tv for the next 3/6/12-month… depending on your goals… eventually you’ll have to try and speak of course (or at least write). At least that’s my assumption when you say “learn Spanish”… obviously, if you just want to understand and not interact… you’re good. --- _[View the full topic](https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/learning-language-vocabulary/53995)._