Right now I’m going to teach you not only how to effectively memorize vocabulary using a combination of visual mnemonic techniques and spaced repetition, but much more importantly: how to learn foreign language vocabulary, that is how to take that step from having the word memorized and knowing its definition to actually learning how to use it properly.  Specifically, you learn when, where, how, and with whom it’s appropriate to use it – this is way beyond just memorizing its definition, which is only a single (but important) part of learning new words in a language.  It takes you to the same level of familiarity and competency with the word in question that native speakers have with it.

Memorization and study/learning techniques in general is something I’ve been fascinated by and learning about for years, nearly as long as I’ve been interested in foreign languages, and not always in relation to foreign languages (they’re good for so many things!).  I’ve read many books on this subject and applied it to many different things over the years.  Now,

obviously, given the nature of this site and the fact that I’m a language nerd, you can probably see where this is going: oh yes, I have all sorts of tricks for learning foreign language vocabulary and even grammar rules and syntax that I’m going to share with you now.

Today I’m just going to cover how to learn vocabulary (words and expressions) and I’m going to give you the most effective method I’ve come up with (that I currently use) in as short a time I can, so let’s go.  Oh, and I’ll also throw in some additional tips and recommendations at the end for sites to check out and books to read if you’d like to learn more about this subject.

3 Simple Steps: Memorize, Review, Apply

Step 1: Memorize the Word

You do this using the substitute word technique coupled with visualizations (both taught below).  This is a sort of temporary superglue used until we can properly and permanently bolt things into place.  It’s very fast (compared to other memorization techniques like rote) and effective, however the downside is that it’s relatively slow on the recall, meaning that relying solely on this technique results in each word taking a second or two (or a few) to recall later on when you need it and obviously that won’t work when you’re speaking a language at full speed or listening to and trying to comprehend someone else speaking a language at full speed where you’ll need to recall several words per second.

These memory techniques have their uses, and those uses are extremely valuable when they’re part of an effective overall system, but they really won’t do the job on their own.  Point is: this is going to save you a lot of time and effort in the beginning when you first learn a new word, it’ll quickly fix it in your short-to-medium-term memory so that you can permanently bolt it into place, so to speak, in your long-term memory via review and, most importantly, application (actually using the word or expression to communicate).

Step 2: Review

Using spaced repetition to review the word or concept you want to remember has been proven to be an extraordinarily effective way of memorizing it and keeping it memorized and fresh in your memory, ready for recall and use at any time you desire.  This will allow you to learn thousands of vocabulary words, keep all of them fresh in your memory via carefully calculated review (the software I’m going to recommend takes care of that, yes it’s free), and only requires a few minutes per day of review (typically 5-30 minutes per day depending on how much you have to do).

Step 3: Apply

This is what really does it, this is what really gets us away from the tricks and techniques and having to work to keep something in our memory, and instead allows us to have it ready for immediate use at any time, able to be recalled in a split second on demand, and without having to work to keep it that way at all.  In other words, it gets it to the same point as all the words in your native language that you already know – you can understand and use them in a split second and it’s not like you have to work at all to keep them in that state, now is it?  Exactly.  That’s what we’re aiming for here.

Not only does practice, actual use, completely take care of the whole “Can I remember it?” problem, but it also is what really makes the word learned rather than merely memorized.  That is, by applying it, by actually using it to communicate with other people, you learn not just the meaning but also the appropriate context in which it should be used and how to do so: you learn when to use it, where to use it, and how to use it.  You’ve truly “learned the word” at that point, you know it and can use it as well as a native speaker.

I’ll show you two different ways you can do this, both of which involve communicating with (one for writing with, one for speaking with) native speakers, and both of which are entirely free.

Learning vs. Memorization

Yes, we’re going to learn the word as well, as in not just what it means but also how and when to use it, but right now, this moment, at the very beginning when you’re first learning a new word in a foreign language: you need to immediately memorize the definition.  That’s Step #1.  That is the most important thing and the best possible jumping off point to actually learning it in my opinion.

We’re going to learn some of the most basic and effective memorization techniques there are, but I want to make their purpose clear: to burn the word into your memory almost instantaneously so that you can immediately get to work applying it thereby allowing you to avoid spending time trying to memorize it by rote or having to look it up and fiddle around with it in the future as you try to apply it.  It’s to aid your practice and application of it, it’s to aid you in learning the word.  It’s a crutch that you use only initially until you’ve actually learned the word such that you can recall it automatically in a split second without any effort, tricks, or techniques just as you can understand and recall the words of your native language as you speak or hear them.  These techniques are to help you get to that point.  No, you will not constantly have to use them every time you want to recall the word in the future, just the first few times until it’s fully cemented into your long-term memory.  This stuff saves you time and effort, that’s all, it’s just a head-start, a useful short-cut (that works!).  It helps you learn, it’s a part of the learning process, it isn’t learning itself.

So how do we do this…and who’s Harry Lorayne?

Harry Lorayne’s 4 Cardinal Rules for Memorization

Harry Lorayne is a well-known and respected author, magician, performer, and memory expert who has written numerous books on memory techniques over the years.  I’ve read a lot of books about how to memorize this, that, and the other, tried all their techniques myself, and I take Harry’s stuff over everyone else’s and I don’t look back.  He’s the man in this field.

His best-selling book on how to memorize things, and the one that I recommend the most if you want to learn more about this as well as the one I’m referencing for this article, is The Memory Book.

We’re going to be using a technique of his called “the substitute word technique”.  This is where you memorize an abstract word – one you would have a hard time visualizing – by coming up with a word that sounds like or reminds you of the word in question and that can be pictured in your mind.  A good example would be the Spanish word “ir”, which means “to go” and is pronounced like the English word “ear”: can you somehow visualize the concept of “going” in your mind in such a way that it’s associated with the Spanish word for it?  Kind of difficult, isn’t it?  “To go” is an abstract concept and therefore difficult to visualize…

How about…how about if we represent the Spanish word “ir” with an actual…giant…running…ear?  How about that?  How about now?  Can you see that in your mind?  Are you likely to forget it any time soon?  No?  That’s the point.

Imagine the ear about the size of  a person, with legs, in running shorts…maybe with the full running regalia on: shorts, running shoes, headband, MP3 player and earbuds, everything…imagine it like that, and imagine it going on a run in the countryside.

Maybe, if you really want to hammer home that it’s got something to do with Spanish, you could have it wearing a shirt with the Spanish flag on it or singing Spanish music to itself (note the shorts in the picture above: they vaguely resemble the Spanish flag).

And there’s more than one way to skin a cat (or ear, as it were): alternatively, if it works better for you, you could imagine a pair of ears, several of them perhaps, playing…the board game Go! “Ir” (pronounced “ear”)…means “to go”…so a bunch of ears playing the board game Go…get it?

Yes, I know, I amaze myself sometimes.

Point is, anytime you hear the Spanish word “ir”, you’ll think of “go”, and any time you think “wait, how do you say ‘to go’ in Spanish?” you’ll think of “ir”.  That’s how this works.  Back to Harry Lorayne’s four rules…

Harry came up with a set of 4 simple rules concerning how to go about coming up with these visualizations that help you memorize whatever it is you want to memorize.  These are extremely useful, pay attention:

1. Substitution – This is what we just learned, you simply substitute something that’s easier to remember for something harder to remember that you’re trying to learn.  The concept of “going” is hard to visualize, an ear is not.  You can see an ear, you can’t see “going”.

2. Out of Proportion – Was our ear regular-sized?  As in, was it a normalish, at least, ear?  No, it was huge, the size of a human, with legs, running, and dressed for the occasion to boot.  Make things bigger or smaller than they would normally be.

3. Exaggeration – This means exaggeration in numbers, as in don’t just see one of whatever you’re trying to visualize, see dozens or thousands or millions.  This is one we didn’t use but could have: you could’ve seen thousands of ears running down the street in a marathon or running across the African plains in a stampede like they’re a herd of antelope or something.

4. Action – Make them do stuff.  This one’s really important.  Was our ear just standing there, saying “I mean, ‘to go'” aloud, or holding a sign that said “To go – ir – it’s Spanish for ‘to go'”?  No, it was running, moving, playing a board game (moving pieces, hopping up and down and/or yelling in excitement, etc.).  Put action in your visualizations.

Note the overall goal here: to make the visualization memorable.  Do whatever you have to in order to make that happen.  It should be, for whatever reason (ridiculous, emotional or personal to you, scary, exciting, etc.), memorable, something not easily forgotten (like a giant running ear).

It doesn’t have to be perfect, and a few more examples

I used to insist that my substitute words be an almost perfect match for the word I was trying to memorize, e.g. if I was trying to memorize the Spanish word “estar”, which means “to be”, I would refuse to use the term “a star” to do so because the first sound, “a”, wasn’t the same sound as the first syllable in “estar”, it was “a-star” instead of “eh-star”.  I’m no longer this anal retentive and have learned that it’s really unnecessary to be so.  Listen carefully…

It only needs to be good enough to remind you of what you want to remember.

That is, it only needs to be able to remind you that the word you’re looking for is “estar”, and “a star” will do that, it’s plenty close enough.  Now, I don’t know how exactly you could use the concept of “a star” to remind you that “estar” is the Spanish word meaning “to be”, perhaps picture a star doing something involving a bee (yeah, the insect kind, hell of a lot easier to visualize that than it is the concept of “to be”, isn’t it?), perhaps it’s riding a giant bee while wearing a Mexican sombrero…

…or fending off millions of them or it’s a Spanish matador, replete with uniform and cape, except instead of a bull it’s waving her red cape at…a bee (a huge one, of course!  and it can’t fly! it charges the star! “Olé!” it yells, “Bzzzzz!” says the bee).

It doesn’t need to include every sound in the word, either.  For example: “entregar” means “to deliver”, I can just see a giant gar (it’s a fish with a very distinctive appearance, see picture below) in a FedEx or UPS uniform delivering a package to the front door of my house (use your house, not just a house, make it distinctive and specific and therefore memorable), whereupon I fling open the door and say, in my most clichéd Pepe Lepeu French accent, “Entré, Monsieur Gar!”.  See that fish below?  Imagine it the size of a human, walking up to your door, whistling, dressed as a UPS driver and delivering a package to you, who upon opening the door say in a crappy French accent, “Entré!”.

“Gar”…”Entré!”…”entregar”…”to deliver”…got it?

Gosh that’s a…unique-looking fish, isn’t it?

Honestly, you could even leave out the “entre” part of “entregar” in your visualization, just stick with the gar-delivering-a-package bit, and it wouldn’t prevent it from working – this is an important point I want to make about this.  It’s good enough to remind me of the word I’m looking for, and good enough is good enough…especially when time is of the essence as it is when you’ve got a lot of vocabulary words to memorize since you’re learning a whole new language so you can’t afford to spend more than a minute or so on each word, and ideally a lot less than that (shouldn’t take more than 5-10 seconds to come up with a solid visualization once you get some practice and master the technique).

Other times this isn’t even necessary (in fact this happens a lot, Spanish and English share lots of cognates) since the word is so close to the equivalent in English (or any other language you speak) that the English word will remind you of the foreign equivalent you’re trying to remember, e.g. the Spanish word for “supplier” is “proveedor” which is close enough to “purveyor” that I really don’t need to do anything else with it, that alone will remind me of “proveedor”.  Another good example is one of two common Spanish words for “car”: “carro” (the other one is “coche” – “carro” is used more in South America whereas “coche” is used in Mexico and most of Central America).  Do you really need a mnemonic to help you remember that “carro” means car?

To remember that “coche” (pronounced “coach-ay”) is the other word that means “car” just involve either a horse-drawn type coach or a sports team type of coach (when possible, use something personal to you: pick a coach you actually know, like one from high school).  You could see a horse coach that’s been turned into a car via the installation of all the various necessary mechanics being driven along (perhaps…by a horse?) spewing exhaust fumes out the back and going “Beep beep!” with its horn as it goes by you…

…or you could see a car that looks like your high school coach driving down the road (it waves at you!), or you could see your high school coach running down the road on all fours at 70 MPH like a car and he makes a racing car style “NNNEEEOOOOWWW!” sound as he goes past.

This is what I’m talking about: animated, action, color, ridiculous, exaggeration, funny, crazy, scary, emotional, personal, huge/tiny…memorable.

Get it?

Step 2: Review

This is what’s going to allow you to have a vocabulary of thousands of foreign words that you never forget, can use/recognize on demand, and all while only spending a few minutes per day reviewing them (I’d guesstimate 15-30mins for 3000-7000 words, just to make the point).  How?

Because only those words that most need to be reviewed will come up for review that day, meaning that you’ll only actually review a few dozen cards, most of which you will already know.  They will be chosen based on based on how new they are, how often they’ve been reviewed before, how often you’ve gotten them right when you do review them, and how long it takes you to answer when you’re shown them

How does this magic take place?  Anki (this link will take you to their site where you can download it for free), that’s how.  In a word, that’s it: just use Anki (this link will take you to an article I wrote on it telling you exactly why it’s so good and how to use it including a demo video I made which I’ve also embedded below).  It uses an algorithm to calculate all the relevant data I previously mentioned and determine which cards you need to see that day.  It’s basically a very sophisticated electronic flashcard system or Spaced Repetition System (aka ‘SRS’).

So what do you actually do?

Simple: as you’re learning new words, have Anki open and put them in it along with the definition and, I recommend, the context in which you originally learned them as an example sentence.  That is, the front of the card would be the English definition and the back of the card would be the foreign word in question (or medical/legal term or whatever it is you’re learning), and of course you can do a second card in reverse (Spanish on front, English definition on back) if you wish though I don’t think that’s necessary since having the English definition on the front forces you to recall the word, and recall is a much more demanding test of memory so if you can recall it you can generally recognize it as well, you don’t need to practice both.

Here’s a video of me demonstrating this, how I use Anki, with a movie that I’m learning Spanish from (I have a whole method on how to do this, how to learn Spanish from TV shows, movies, music, and the like called The Telenovela Method if you’re interested):

That is some awesome hair, isn’t it?

Step 3: Apply

This is the real winning move right here, this is what makes you truly fluent in a language: using it with native speakers.

Hang on, don’t get scared, we’ve got a couple different ways we can go about this, no you don’t have to actually speak to someone if you don’t want to (though that is one way and an excellent one at that), there are written means I’ll cover as well.  Now, to emphasize how important this is and explain why, I’m going to just quote what I’ve said elsewhere:

You’ve learned some new words and phrases and grammar, you’ve learned what they mean, but…you have not learned how to use them, that is you have not learned them such that you can correctly use them in a conversation with a native speaker. It does not matter how well you’ve memorized the definitions or grammar rules or even how many different contexts you’ve seen/heard them used in (though it helps, and note my emphasis on “seen/heard”, I emphasize the passive nature of that action).

The only way to learn this is to learn by doing, the only way to learn how to use what you’ve learned so far is to use it, the only way to learn how to speak properly is to speak improperly to a native speaker, who will point out your errors and tell you the right way to do it, and that is when and how you will learn to do it correctly. You will learn by making mistakes as fast as you can: the more errors you expose to the light, the blinding light of critical examination, and the faster you do so, the better you will get at actually communicating (speaking and writing) with native speakers, which is what I know the great majority of you are most interested in, and the faster you shall do so.

– The preceding two paragraphs are taken verbatim from my book, The Telenovela Method.

So how, specifically, can we go about doing this?

Technique #1: Lang-8

Lang-8 (official website) is essentially a high-tech penpal system, a sort of written online language exchange where you post things written in the language you want to learn and native speakers correct it for you (because they get points for it, essentially, that they can then use to get native speakers of the language they’re learning to correct their writings for them).  I highly recommend you refer to the full article I wrote about Lang-8 just recently: How to Practice Writing a Foreign Language (and get native speakers to review and correct it for you for free!): Lang-8, but in summary:

You make what are called “journal entries” that can be about absolutely anything you want (I like to make up goofy stories, it’s fun and people enjoy correcting them): fiction, something about your day, something that happened in your past, commentary about current events (pick a news story and talk about it, simple), whatever you want.  Then, you publish it and wait for a native speaker to correct it (won’t take long, typically 15-30 minutes for popular languages like Spanish, French, English, etc.).  Those corrections will look something like this:

That’s from a story I wrote a couple years ago.  The red and blue ink and strike-through you see are corrections made by a native speaker to my Spanish, then you’ll notice he’s left a comment explaining his corrections and giving suggestions as to how I can make it sound better.  Isn’t that lovely?

Also, note that when I write these entries on Lang-8 I always do so with the purpose of applying/testing some new vocabulary I’ve just learned, in this case it was the word “Aún”, which I had learned from Pan’s Labyrinth (great movie, highly recommended for learning Spanish), as well as wanting to figure out how to say the expression “to have heard”, like “to have heard people saying”, so I figured I would just take my best shot at how I thought one might say that in Spanish and wait to see what the native speakers would say: it worked!

I tried “había oido hablar de que…” (roughly “she had heard talk of…”) and that was corrected to “había oído decir que” (something like “she had heard it said that…”), so that’s how you express that in Spanish (plus he corrected my misspelling of “oído”: the “i” should have an accent)!  Cool!  See how quickly and easily I learned that?  See how effective that is?

Give it a shot yourself.

Technique #2: Language Exchanges

Feeling brave?  Ready to talk face-to-face in real time with a native speaker and show them just how well you can butcher, I mean speak, their language?

A language exchange is another excellent way to apply Spanish that you’ve just learned.  For those unfamiliar I recommend reading my article about why they’re so important and how to fully utilize them but in short the way they work is that you first sign up on a language exchange site (I recommend iTalki – that’s their site and here’s my review of them), which are generally free to use (all the good ones are in my experience), and then use it to meet native speakers who are also learning your native language, talk to them via Skype, do half the exchange in the language you’re learning and half the exchange in the language they’re learning (your native language), with each one correcting the other in exchange, hence the term “language exchange”.

So, for example, if you’re a native English speaker learning Spanish (the most likely scenario given my audience), then you would find native Spanish speakers learning English via the language exchange site, set up a time to talk via Skype, and then when you do so you would spend half the session in Spanish with them helping you and half the session in English with you helping them.  Typical times are 15 minutes in one language and 15 minutes in the other.  Simple, it doesn’t cost anything, and it’s probably the single most effective thing you can do to learn the language.

Of course, what I’m saying you should do here is use your newly learned vocabulary during said language exchange on Skype and the native speaker will help you do so and correct any mistakes you make – you learn how to properly use that vocabulary by using it with a native speaker!

*Super useful tip!

What I recommend you do is either write up something to say ahead of time that incorporates the vocabulary or at least have it in list format in front of you during the exchange. That is, have a text file or something similar open during your Skype session with them that contains either a list of words/expressions you’re going to try to use or a list of things to say (sentences/paragraphs) that contain the those words/expressions.

You could also obviously do the above in real life with any native speakers who are friends or relatives you have, or if there’s some sort of local language exchange program in your area (check Meetup.com) then you could do it that way, and that would be fantastic.

Oh, hey, couple quick questions before we wrap it up: how do you say “to go” in Spanish, what’s the verb?  How about “to be”?  Maybe you can recall how to say “to deliver” while you’re at it?

😉

Conclusion and a related free site and some books I think you may be interested in…

Whew!  That was a long one.  I don’t do these (looong posts) too often, they take forever in writing, resource location, and editing, but when I do they tend to be popular (that one’s been just killing it in terms of traffic for years) so it’s definitely something I’ll keep doing regularly.  I really hope that helped you, please do leave any criticisms or suggestions in the comments, and stick around for a second for a couple of additional resources I really think will be of interest to you.

I’ve recently completed a course on Coursera, which is a site that offers free university level courses in just about everything (can’t recommend it highly enough, so much you can learn on there and it’s all free), called Learning How to Learn with Professor Barbara Oakley, PhD.  I highly recommend you keep an eye out for that course (it’s finished now) and sign up for it in the future when it becomes available again (just checked, the next class is scheduled to start January 2nd of 2015).  Additionally, the course is based very closely on a book she wrote which I also highly recommend called A Mind for Numbers which, despite its title, is actually a book about general learning with only a slight emphasis on science and math (and requires absolutely no mathematical or scientific background, by the way).

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

I have a whole method and a book I wrote about it called The Telenovela Method where I teach you how to learn Spanish from popular media like TV shows, movies, music, books, etc. that you can all find online for free.  It was the #1 new release in the Spanish Language Instruction section on Amazon for nearly a month after it came out and currently has 17 reviews there with a 4.9/5 stars average.  It's available for $7.99-$9.99 for the e-book version depending on who you buy it from (Kindle version on Amazon is now $7.99) and $16.99 for the paperback (occasionally a bit cheaper, again, depending on who you buy it from).

It's currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

• Amazon
• iBooks (the iTunes store)
• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble
• Google Play Store
• Goodreads
• Scribd
• Ciando

Cheers,
Andrew

This is one of those personal preference things, it really is: within the language-learning community, from experienced polyglots who speak half a dozen languages and have been learning languages for 20 years or more you’ll get a myriad of opinions on the matter, some of them polar opposites of each other.  And that’s fine.  They’ve tried a bunch of

things and sorted out what works best for them, and you’ll have to do that, too.  There’s no getting around it: to figure out what works best for you, you’re going to have to try several different methods and styles of learning, you’re going to have to figure it out by testing.  Just like with many other things in life you’re going to have to fail your way to success: meaning the only way to figure out what works is to try a dozen things that don’t, first.

That said, I’d definitely like to give you some guidelines based off of my experience and what I’ve learned and heard from other language learners…

Vocabulary and Grammar

There is a certain minimum amount of basic vocabulary, grammar, and syntax that you have to know to even begin learning to speak and read the language, but it’s probably far smaller than you think.  You can get the minimum down in a few days (you’d be surprised how many words you can learn if you do it properly) and the best way to go about determining what you need to know is to expose yourself to popular media in the language in question (news broadcasts or, better, TV shows and movies with lots of natural conversations between natives) and look up and learn those words you see being used repeatedly.  These will be basic things such as, “the, at, go, is, are, you, he, she, it, were, am going,” etc.  Those things that you have to know to be able to work with a language at all and how to use them (minimal syntax and grammar), you will end up learning, it’s inevitable.  Done.

What Now?

Well, what do you want to do with the language you’re learning? Do you need to be able to, primarily, speak with other people? Do you need to be able to, primarily, read trade journals or technical manuals or news items in the language in question? Do you just want to be able to watch TV shows? What you want to do, what’s important to you, is what will determine how you go about this.

If you want to be able to speak, start speaking.  Hell, you could do that from Day 1 while you’re just getting some basic vocabulary and grammar down, throw yourself in the deep end of the pool, after you get over that initial shock of the cold water you’ll be glad you did it and you’ll find that it’s nowhere near as bad as you thought it was going to be.  Get on a language exchange site or a social network, find native speakers, or find some locally if you can, and START TALKING!

If you want to be able to read, start reading.  If you want to be able to read news items and general books, then use the method I described above, acquire those items, and start reading them–like I said, it might take you an hour to finish a single page, but you will learn FAST if you’ll do this and stick with it.  Same thing goes for if you want to be able to understand trade publications or more technical information: get the sort of material that you want to be able to read, pull up Google or an online dictionary (for Spanish I highly recommend SpanishDict) and get to work.  You’ll get faster and faster and faster as you go along, and won’t take as long as you think to get to a respectable rate of speed.

In Summary…

Notice a pattern here? Whatever it is that you want to do, the best way to learn how to do that is to start doing it no matter how bad you are at it to begin with! Just go, dive in, kick your own butt, make yourself do this–it’s not as scary as you think, you can do it!  I know I keep repeating this, but so many people want to procrastinate and delay and “prepare” by reading grammar books, doing verb conjugation workbooks, memorizing “just a few more words” before they’ll finally “be ready” to start speaking with native speakers: don’t do that, JUST GO!

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

I have a whole method and a book I wrote about it called The Telenovela Method where I teach you how to learn Spanish from popular media like TV shows, movies, music, books, etc. that you can all find online for free.  It was the #1 new release in the Spanish Language Instruction section on Amazon for nearly a month after it came out and currently has 17 reviews there with a 4.9/5 stars average.  It's available for $7.99-$9.99 for the e-book version depending on who you buy it from (Kindle version on Amazon is now $7.99) and $16.99 for the paperback (occasionally a bit cheaper, again, depending on who you buy it from).

It's currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

• Amazon
• iBooks (the iTunes store)
• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble
• Google Play Store
• Goodreads
• Scribd
• Ciando

Cheers,
Andrew

This is going to start out a bit technical and academic, but I promise that if you’ll wade through it you will be rewarded with some very useful practical information that you can use to significantly enhance your learning of the Spanish language, or any other second language, by not just doing it better but doing it more efficiently and therefore requiring far less time to become fluent.  Understanding how many words you need to know to be fluent in Spanish will help you design a study system based on precisely what it is that you want to do with the language: speak with native speakers, read fiction, read and/or write in a technical or academic field, etc., or some combination thereof.  This is a very important distinction to make because, as you’ll see in the study below, although there isn’t much difference between how many words you need to know to speak Spanish and how many you need to write Spanish, which words are most commonly used and therefore should be focused on does vary significantly between the two applications.  First, let’s start with some definitions so that we can understand what’s going on here:

Lexeme: A lexeme is a reduction of a word to it’s most basic meaning.  For example: the word “water” could be a noun referring to H2O, or it could be a verb referring to the act of giving water to a plant, so in this case that counts as two separate and distinct lexemes, even though it’s the same word, “water”.  The reason it is done this way is that if you have to learn both definitions then it is, for our purposes, the same as learning two different words that each have only one definition – it requires the same amount of time and effort and memory space in your head, so when we say “how many words do you need to know?” we’re counting lexemes, or in lay terms, “definitions”.  In other words, we’re saying that each definition is to be counted as a separate “word” (when it’s done this way, it’s called a lexeme), regardless of whether those definitions refer to the same precise combination of letters (what would commonly be called a word) or not: the noun “water” and the verb “water” are two separate words (or lexemes, more accurately), right? Right.  I should also note that different forms (such as with verbs) of the same word, as long as the same basic definition is maintained, count as one lexeme, so “is” and “are” are not two separate lexemes, but one.

Corpus: Latin for “body”. The body of knowledge that you based your information on, in this case books, newspapers, transcripts of spoken language, etc. Basically it means your data set.  With regards to determining word frequency, the corpus is what it is that you looked at to determine which words occur and with what frequency.  If your corpus for making a frequency list for English is 13th century bibles, then your data isn’t going to be too relevant to contemporary language.

Register: What setting the language is used in.  We’re going to have three distinct registers that we’ll use: oral (spoken language), written fiction, and written non-fiction.

Range: How widely used the word is.  In other words, if your corpus consists of four books, and a particular word shows up as 5% of all words in one book and never occurs in any of the others, that one book is going to incorrectly weight that word as being a lot more important than it likely really is – you would say that particular word “has a very narrow range”.  An example would be if you’ve got a diet book as part of your corpus, we’ll presume it’s small, you might find that the words “protein”, “cardiovascular”, and “glycemic” end up on your frequency list when they probably shouldn’t because these words aren’t often used in daily conversation or most written communication – this is because you’ve got something that’s part of your corpus that has a very narrow and specific subject matter that wouldn’t normally be discussed very frequently, and therefore some of the words used therein have a very narrow range.  Usually it wouldn’t be something this extreme, since such obvious outliers would be removed from the corpus by a competent researcher, but what you will see are words that are used very frequently in written communication but hardly at all in spoken communication and vice-versa: that is important and something to take note of.

First, some data

The primary study that I’m going off of here is that done by Mark Davies at Brigham Young University, which I will embed below so that you can read it, download it, whatever you want to do:

Spanish Word Frequency Study by Andrew Tracey on Scribd

This is a truly unique and valuable study: you would think that there would be lots of data out there with regards to word frequency lists in Spanish, and lots of good Spanish frequency diciontaries, but there aren’t.  There’s no lack of curious language students and researchers asking, “Just how many words do you need to know to be fluent in Spanish/French/German?” etc. (I should note this also depends heavily on how you define “fluent” but that’s another discussion entirely).  The primary reason is that it’s so difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to do a study like this properly.  The next most recent comparable study was one done in 1964 (he makes mention of it in the beginning).

They extracted the 6000 most frequent lexemes and broke it down by written fiction, written non-fiction, and oral (spoken); they then further organized the data by lexeme type (noun, adjective, adverb, etc.) so you’ll see which particular type of word is the most used thereby allowing you to focus your studies appropriately.

By the way, the frequency dictionary they mention, which this study was written about, that contains the entire list of the 6000 highest-frequency lexemes, is available if you’re interested.  For some reason the hardcover is ridiculously expensive at $156, but they’ve got a paperback edition here on Amazon for $34.95 as of this writing.

Right, let’s get down to brass tacks.  According to the above study, for Spanish:

1. Learning the first 1000 most frequently used words in the entire language will allow you to understand 76.0% of all non-fiction writing, 79.6% of all fiction writing, and an astounding 87.8% of all oral speech.
2. Learning the top 2000 most frequently used words will get you to 84% for non-fiction, 86.1% for fiction, and 92.7% for oral speech.
3. And learning the top 3000 most frequently used words will get you to 88.2% for non-fiction, 89.6% for fiction, and 94.0% for oral speech.

How many words do you need to know to speak Spanish?

Essentially, just learning the top 1000 words will, if you’re primarily interested in speaking to people as most language learners are, get you to the point where you can understand roughly 90% of the spoken language – this is more than enough to be able to muddle through nearly any conversation.  Sure, you’ll have to stop the speaker frequently to get them to define words for you and/or you may have to pull out your dictionary quite frequently, but my point is that it’s enough of a base for you to actually start speaking to people (which is the most important part of learning any language: actually talking to native speakers) – you’ll be able to say nearly anything you need to in some way or another, and you should be able to understand the general gist of what someone else is saying to you, even if you do have to stop and ask them for help a few times.

“The maddening thing about these numbers and statistics is that they are impossible to pin down precisely and thus they vary from source to source. The rounded numbers that I use to explain this to my students I usually write in a bull’s eye target on the whiteboard, but I don’t have the computer skills to draw circles in this post, so I will just have to give a list:

 

250 words constitute the essential core of a language, those without which you cannot construct any sentence.

 

750 words constitute those that are used every single day by every person who speaks the language.

 

2500 words constitute those that should enable you to express everything you could possibly want to say, albeit often by awkward circumlocutions.

 

5000 words constitute the active vocabulary of native speakers without higher education.

 

10,000 words constitute the active vocabulary of native speakers with higher education.

 

20,000 words constitute what you need to recognize passively in order to read, understand, and enjoy a work of literature such as a novel by a notable author.”

Now, in the above study by Davies, here’s where things start to get really interesting:

“Assume that a language learner is aiming for 90% coverage in each of the four parts of speech that represent open classes — nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. This 90% figure will be obtained by knowing about 2600 nouns, 230 verbs, 980 adjectives, and 50 adverbs, or a total of about 3800 total forms.” [refer to page 110 of the study for a detailed table that breaks down these four word types in much greater detail]

So you can see that nouns completely dominate the average spoken vocabulary (the above data is from the spoken, not written, corpus), constituting 2600 out of 3800 lexemes, which is 68.4%, more than two-thirds, of all lexemes used.  You should keep in mind, however, that each verb is counted as a single lexeme no matter how it is conjugated: so saying that you only need to know 230 verbs is a bit disingenuous when you not only have to know each of those verbs but you also have to ‘know’ a bunch of different conjugations for each one as well (e.g. you don’t just have to learn ‘ser’, you have to learn ‘soy’, ‘eres’, ‘es’, ‘somos’, ‘son’, ‘fui’, ‘fuiste’, ‘fue’, ‘sea’, ‘seamos’, ‘sean’, etc.).

How many words do you need to know to write Spanish?

Also, they found that (here’s where we get into register and range) certain words had a very high frequency of use in one of the three registers (oral, written fiction, written non-fiction) but barely appeared at all in the other two, or it was present in two (typically both written registers) but not at all in one of the others.  So you’ll see that there are words which are far more valuable to learn than certain other words depending on which register you’re most interested in becoming proficient in.  Have a look at the two tables below, the first one shows the ten words with the greatest difference in range between oral and non-fiction that have an extremely high oral range (they are very commonly spoken words), whereas the second table shows the same except these are the ten words with the greatest frequency difference that have an extremely high range in written non-fiction (they’re extremely common in non-fiction writing but not at all in oral speech)…I’m not sure I explained that well, if not leave a comment and I’ll try again:

Table 1

Table 2

Why? For what purpose are you learning this language?

How you intend to use the language in question (Spanish or whatever the case may be for you) is very important in determining which words you should focus on, primarily this comes into play with regards to whether you’re more concerned about the spoken language or the written language.  Most language-learners are far more concerned about being able to actually speak to native speakers of the language than they are with anything else, though there are exceptions (people who wish to be able to read certain specific technical journals, such as an engineer who only wants to be able to read the original German or Japanese instruction manuals and schematics for the devices used in his field and does not need to be able to actually speak the language) as well as certain special needs (someone who is most interested in spoken language, but they also need special emphasis in a certain area, such as the businessman who not only wants to speak basic everyday Japanese but also needs to learn certain business terms that are specific only to his job and wouldn’t be common anywhere else).

So…what are you going to use it for? Do you have any special needs or areas of interest that you would like to learn the terminology for in the language you’re learning?  I’m a pretty big computer nerd, so in addition to everyday spoken Spanish, I might also like to know how to say things like “hard drive”, “TCP/IP”, “Python [the programming language]”, “blog”, “forum”, “social news”, “search engine”, “link”, etc.  See what I mean?  Don’t neglect areas like that, everyone has some–whether you’re into cars or rugby or chess or collecting dead insects, you’re likely going to want to know the words and phrases that are common only in those specific subjects.

Practical Application, or: What’s the point of all this?

Look, if you’ll use a quality SRS (Spaced Repetition Software) like Anki and spend 30-45 minutes a day studying vocabulary, you can very easily learn 20, 30, even 50 new words per day up to the point where you’ve got a couple thousand words in your target language within a month or so, it would be very easy.  If you’ll do that, and maybe practice speaking a bit by watching subtitled movies and repeating after the native speakers (pause, repeat what someone just said, rewind and repeat as necessary until you’ve got it, wash rinse repeat, etc.) for a couple of weeks, you’ll be at the point where you’ll be able to start conversing with native speakers, albeit poorly (my favorite saying: “You learn to speak a language by doing so, poorly at first”).  You’ll be awkward and slow but you will be able to muddle through, and you will pick up speed very rapidly if you’ll make it a habit to speak with a native for an hour or so a day, every day (remember: consistency!).  I promise you’ll be conversationally fluent within a couple of months of the time that you started conversing with natives.  Voila, you’re there.  What are the best ways to do this?

The best way is with a one-on-one tutor, and for that I recommend a service called iTalki (you’re looking at about $8-15/hour for informal conversation practice/instruction, more for a formal course or test prep.).  However, given that you’ll want at least 2-3 classes per week and that comes out to $16-$45 per week – or between $64 and $180 per month – that’s too expensive for many people and in that case I really recommend you check out a service called GoSpanish that provides unlimited online classes with a native speaker (live, on a video call similar to Skype) for as little as $39 per month (yes, that’s $39/month for unlimited 1-hour classes, you can take a dozen a day every day if you like).  Their class size is typically just 3-5 students per teacher and, having taken classes with them myself, I can tell you they’re excellent.  See my review of GoSpanish here for more information.  Also, if you’re interested, I’ve reviewed iTalki as well.

Here’s a quote from someone commenting on that HTLAL thread I mentioned above:

“I can add from my experience that knowledge of about 1500 words allows you to get a fairly general picture of everything you read. This is the number of Hungarian words I learned since march. I write them all down on flashcards and count how much each day – that’s why I can pinpoint the number.

 

At the same time it is obvious that my 1500 word vocab isn’t tweaked to efficiency in basic communication. I simply write down and translate everything I read and lately also the words I manage to pick up from radio. That’s why I know the hungarian word for “voter turnout” but I don’t know yet how to book a flight or hotel room :/”

And this leads into my last, and most important point: all of this is just a means to and end, and that end is speaking.  You must speak.  The whole point of figuring out all this word frequency crap is just so you can get away from it as fast as possible and into the realm of actually talking to native speakers, because that is where you really learn the language.  Memorizing all the vocabulary and grammar rules in the world, as my friend Benny loves to say, will not ever get you anywhere near fluent.  I’ll leave you with a quote from a native Czech speaker and fellow language nerd (it’s the last post in that HTLAL thread):

“Yesterday I met a woman who has been taking Czech lessons twice a week for two years. I asked her some very simple questions “Do you like coffee?”, “Are you Czech?” and she was completely tongue tied. The best she could manage was “Urm, arm, yes” to the first question, and “no” to the second.

 

At first I imagined she didn’t know much Czech at all. I decided to probe into her vocabulary, and found it was quite extensive. She knew words like “octopus” and “hovercraft” in Czech. Yes somehow couldn’t say “To be honest, I prefer tea”.

 

I gave her a two hour lesson in how to construct useful conversational phrases. Starting off with simple things like “I have to say that ..” and “Don’t be upset, but” and building up and chaining these things together into more complex sentences such as “That isn’t something I have given much thought to, but … now that I reflect on it, … my personal opinion is …”

 

She told me it was a very uplifting lesson, since she now felt “fluent” in Czech rather than being frozen with a trapped vocabulary of thousands of words. In fact, she got back to me later that after the lesson, she went into the city and had sophisticated and stressless conversations in a couple shops and with a waitress in an ice-cream parlour.

 

Of course, I was delighted to hear this, and it certainly gave my ego a boost. But, what was most joyful for me to hear is that it would now give her future learning a “usefulness filter”. She said that now she wouldn’t just remember lists of words, but rather filter them through how useful they would be in real conversations, and that real conversations, with real people, will help her get a reality check on this as she goes along.”

You can learn all the vocabulary in the world, but if you don’t learn how to use it, you’re never going to be fluent, and the only way to do that is to speak with native speakers.  Again, I really recommend having a look at GoSpanish, they’re super cheap for what they’re offering.  Check out my review of them here for more info and/or go to their site for a free trial if you like.

Additional Resources and Further Reading

Please be sure to persuse the whole “Basic Spanish Grammar Rules: Lessons & Explanation” category on my site, I have several other articles there that may interst you, especially What Spanish Verb Tenses You Should Learn First, and Why They’re So Important, a brief guide to regional variation of forms of address (tú, usted, vos, etc.) and my beginner’s guide to the Spanish subjunctive.

Professor Arguelles’ website on language-learning

Part 4 of Iversen’s Guide to Learning Languages: How many words do you need to learn?

Here’s the RAE’s reference corpus of current Spanish taken from a combination (says this site) of spoken and written sources (kind of a problem since it only gives you a very general idea of how common these words are and you can’t sort by spoken/written and, as we noted above, there can be some big discrepancies there between the two).   The Real Academia Española (the “Royal Spanish Academy”) is by far the single most respected authority on the Spanish language; see the Wikipedia article on them for more information.

Somebody else did the pull-them-from-subtitles trick on their own and then made their data publicly available.  Here’s the Spanish list published so you can read it online without having to download it first.

Here’s an excellent paper by Paul Nation and Robert Waring at the Notre Dame Seishin University in Japan called: Vocabulary Size, Text Coverage And Word Lists

Here are a series of lists on Wiktionary taken from subtitles of movies by somebody back in 2007.  As they note, many of these are from translations of English-language movies and so won’t really give you the most accurate picture of what’s naturally used in Spanish.

Here’s a very widely circulated list of the 1000 most common words in English.

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

I have a whole method and a book I wrote about it called The Telenovela Method where I teach you how to learn Spanish from popular media like TV shows, movies, music, books, etc. that you can all find online for free.  It was the #1 new release in the Spanish Language Instruction section on Amazon for nearly a month after it came out and currently has 17 reviews there with a 4.9/5 stars average.  It's available for $7.99-$9.99 for the e-book version depending on who you buy it from (Kindle version on Amazon is now $7.99) and $16.99 for the paperback (occasionally a bit cheaper, again, depending on who you buy it from).

It's currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

• Amazon
• iBooks (the iTunes store)
• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble
• Google Play Store
• Goodreads
• Scribd
• Ciando

Cheers,
Andrew