That's about how I describe
myself sometimes..... a Spanish Vocabulary word list collector. I
carry a small pocket sized notebook with me most of the places I
go. It's about the size of a Reader's Digest magazine and I write
down all sorts of things inside. If I think of a neat idea, or see
an unusual product I may write down information about it to look up
later.
More importantly for how to learn
spanish though is to use it to collect vocabulary words that
I don't recognize. Used to I would stop and look up words as I
came, that was quite tedious and I never seemed to remember them
for long. SO, writing them down so that I could later put them into
my SRS program, Mnemosyne.... that has really helped me to acquire
vocabulary faster. I currently have about 5700 cards in Mnemosyne
(2 cards for each word since it tests you each direction.) Of
those, only about 470 haven't yet been seen and I have three pages
worth of "new" words in my notebook to look up and create cards
for.
Of course, I do have a few typos here and there in my collection of
words, but I've found my ability to follow spoken Spanish has gone
up quite a bit since I've been plowing through this word
"collector" strategy. I've had some duplication (it's hard NOT to
really). But I think it's part of a good strategy to study languages.
Where do I collect words from? Audio, tv are a couple sources since
spanish is fairly easily transcribed from pronounced words.... most
of my new vocabulary comes from the things I read though,
magazines, local spanish language newspapers, books, etc.
Vocabulary is not language certainly, but after learning the proper
sentence structure and about the various parts of speech (verb
conjugation, present/future/past tense, etc.) Expanding your
vocabulary is really essential. One of the things that I find
interesting is that I seem to keep finding cognates for English
words (many that I may not have known) as I go through this
process.



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