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.