Spanish Words
One of the easiest ways to get lost in endless frustration is with Spanish words and vocabulary!
Too many people are making the classic mistake of learning Spanish words which in fact they'll never use or if they do, it will only be occassionally.
That is a sure fire way to failure when learning Spanish!
Instead you must have a plan of attack for Spanish words and vocabulary. I would advise you to forget all about word lists and lists associated with cooking, travel, shopping ECT... they are really not worth the effort.
Here's the key to follow...
- In order to have a basic working vocabulary you need 1000 Spanish words
- In order to have a conversational vocabulary you'll need around 3000 words
So you see that even though there are 100,000's of Spanish words, in REAL LIFE, we'll only use a select few of them.
The Distinction Between Spanish Words and Spanish Verbs!
When you learn Spanish Verbs you are learning the structure of the language. How a language uses it's verbs gives you the structure upon which all else is built just the same as the basic structure
of a building.
It's therefore very important to isolate the learning of Spanish Verbs from the learning of Spanish Words, i.e nouns, adjectives and adverbs.
A conversational list of Spanish Verbs would number about 150 - yes that's all! So you can see that actually learning the individual verbs is not difficult, learning how to use each one in all it's tenses is the challenge.
Can you see how learning verbs is distinctively different from vocab? That's why they should be seperated.
Say The Same Thing 5 Different Ways
Thank God for this fact of life and language! Let's suppose you have a conversational Spanish word list of 3000 words and 150 essential core verbs. You'll find that you'll still have to be creative in saying what you want.
The trick is this - if you can't say something one way in Spanish, find another.
If you think about this for a moment in English you'll realise that it's possible to say a sentance which means the same thing but in many different ways. This flexibility in language is what will save you over and over again in Spanish.
There's normally always a way to say what you want once you have your basic vocabulary. You just need to be creative in thinking "How can I communcate that with my current depth of vocabulary?".
It's takes a bit of practice but you'll improve with trying.