Two Strategies to Learn Vocabulary in Spanish

Language can be divided into various components. When talking about language learning, vocabulary becomes one of those components. As a result, it would be a good idea for learners to create strategies which aim at learning vocabulary. The main objective of this article is to suggest two strategies to achieve that purpose: "graded books" and a vocabulary chart.

Graded books:

Reading in the target language provides various opportunities to learn vocabulary. Nevertheless, Spanish learners should choose very carefully the texts they read; if a text is too easy for the learner, it could not trigger any learning process; if a text is too advanced, it could frustrate him or her. As a consequence, the reading material should meet perfectly the students' level.

Since most of the times choosing the most suitable reading material is not an easy task for the learners, a very effective strategy is to use "graded books". These books are a special type of reading material for language learning because they are specially adapted to basic, intermediate or advanced Spanish levels. One of the main objectives of the "graded books" is to help learners increase their vocabulary by means of presenting 70% of known words and a 30% of new ones. One effective strategy when reading "graded books" is to look words up in the dictionary just when the learner finds two o more unknown words in the same sentence. When there is just one unknown word in a sentence, it is quite advisable to try to understand the word from the context (without looking it up in the dictionary) because the best way to learn vocabulary in a foreign language is by connecting the word and the concept without using the native language.

Vocabulary chart:

Learning a foreign language should be a reflective process that demands from learners the use of various learning strategies. One of those strategies is the "vocabulary chart". It is a chart that contains 4 columns; the first 3 columns are word categories: noun, verb and adjective, the last one is a column for a picture. The objective is to learn 3 categories of the same word; for instance:

1. Noun:

Cuidado (care)

2. Verb:

Cuidar (look after)

3. Adjective:

Cuidadoso (careful)

4. Picture:

The last part of the chart is the picture; the objective is to activate learning processes that help the learner increase his or her vocabulary by means of connecting the words with an image.

As a conclusion, although learning a foreign language is a complex task, learners can use various strategies to learn faster and more effectively. This article suggests two relevant strategies to learn vocabulary: the "graded books" and the vocabulary chart.

Freddy Ratm is an online Spanish tutor who designs interactive free Spanish lessons for Spanish learners. Visit my website to take a look at some free interactive Spanish lessons.

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