Vocabulary

Well, when it all comes down to it, a lot of learning a language is to do with learning words! There's a lot of other bits, as well, of course, otherwise all you'd need would be to buy a dictionary; but learning some words would be a good place to start.


Now, let's look at two questions:


Which words should you be learning?

How should you go about learning them?

One should generally begin, I feel, not with the words which are easiest to remember, but with the most everyday and useful ones. (A significant exception to this is the Michel Thomas course, which memorably begins with No es acetable así - It is not acceptable like that. I like the Michel Thomas course a lot; it´s expensive (so get it from the library!), but it does offer something significantly different from other courses, and by the end you should be able to put quite long sentences together without much effort. I´ll post more about it later)

Anyway, ¡Hola!, ¡Adiós!, Por favor, gracias, Me llamo....
and the numbers 1 - 12 would seem a good place to start. Move on to describing yourself and your family, buying groceries and asking for the time and directions.

Why start here, if these words and phrases aren´t the easiest to remember? Well, once you´ve learnt how to ask the time, you can get immediate satisfaction when you go to Spain just asking people again and again what time it is! After a while, you may even start to find that you are beginning to understand their answers!

Likewise, I still keep find myself asking people questions in Spain, even when I already know the answer! It´s just fun to be talking Spanish! So ask where the Main Square is ¿Dónde está la Plaza Mayor? even if you´ve already been there. Don´t worry if you don´t understand the answer - just wander off in the general direction they were pointing and then ask someone else!

Right that´s enough for now, more later.