The ONLY Thing You Need To Expand Your Spanish Vocabulary ｜ LEARN SPANISH

Hey, ¿qué es la que hay en mi gente? It's Rocky here from SpeakSpanishFaster.com and in today's video, I want to share with you the one way, the only thing you really need to do to significantly expand your Spanish vocabulary. Now, this is very, very key if you want to learn more Spanish words so that you can speak Spanish better, understand Spanish better, all that good stuff. Now, when it comes to expanding your vocabulary is very, very simple. Now, it's not necessarily easy. Learning Spanish itself isn't necessarily easy because it takes time, it takes consistency, it takes courage, but it's simple. In other words, you don't really need to do that many things to learn. You just have to be consistent in consumption and consuming Spanish. But, with that being said, there are ways to speed up the learning curve. There are ways to improve your Spanish even faster, to learn more words faster, and to retain words and remember the words better without memorizing them, without having to memorize a list of words. That's not how we learn languages and we acquire, that's not how we acquire languages, and that's not how you're going to get fluent in Spanish. Instead, what you need to do is what I'm about to show you in this video. So, you guys know that every time a video, in every video pretty much I talk about the way to learn Spanish is to consume comprehensible input. Consume a lot of Spanish, that's how you learn. And then I say yeah, write down the words that you don't know, study those words. A lot of times that information or what I say there is sort of vague, like I don't give direct directions or criteria on how to do that. So, in today's video, I really want to dig in deep to the idea of really expanding your vocabulary. How do you do it when you are consuming content? What's the best way to go about that? This could be Netflix, movies, it could be YouTube videos, it could be podcasts, if there's a transcription. The main thing you need is the text and the audio to go with the text. You don't necessarily need the audio, but I always love having the audio because it allows you to hear Spanish while you're reading it. So, you knock out two birds with one stone because there's two forms of input, listening and reading, and then there's two forms of output, speaking and writing. So, all you really need to worry about is the input for now. Now, when it comes to that, let's say you're consuming a piece of content. So, I have a piece of content here on my computer screen. I'm going to share my screen with you now. I'm going to read through this piece of content, and then we're going to sort of do the exercise and what you need to do to really improve your vocabulary to retain words better and to retain more words. Alright, so let's go through this. Un día, Kevin fue al mercado con su mamá. Ellos querían comprar frutas y verduras. En el mercado, Kevin vio mucha manzana, fresa y naranja. Su mamá le dijo, vamos a comprar manzanas y fresas para hacer una ensalada de frutas. Kevin estaba muy feliz porque le gusta mucho la ensalada de fruta. Después, ellos regresaron a casa y prepararon la ensalada juntos. Fue un día muy divertido. Okay, so, we have our text here. Alright, now, what we're going to do is let's pick out three words here. Let's say you were consuming this content. You were listening to me reading it, and you were reading it at the same time, and there were three words that you didn't know. So, let's say the words were mercado, comprar, and regresaron. So, let's say those are the three words that you didn't know. So, what do you do? How do you go about this? A lot of people, what they're just going to do is write those three words down on a list, study that list, but there's a problem with that. And the problem is that when you are reviewing this list a week from now, a month from now, there's no context behind those words. So, you just see words, and you're really in the state of memorizing because there's no context there. So, you just have to know what the word means. It makes it very difficult to retain that. So, instead of that, what we want to do is we want to mark the phrase that the word is in. So, for example, okay, and you can even add vamos a comprar manzanas, but I kept this shorter, and regresaron a casa. Alright, so we have those three phrases right there. Now, what happens now is when we put those words on a list, and this is how I like to set it up, you can just use a journal, you can use a notepad, whatever you want to do. The simple way is to have a journal. Alright, you have a simple journal, and you just write in your journal every day a list of words that you had trouble with that day, but you write them in the phrase. Now, when you do that, be sure to do it in this format with the name of the video or the podcast you consumed, the date, and then have your list because what you're doing here is you are building context around those words which is going to make it much easier to retain and recall those words when you go to study them. So, we have on the left side, we have Spanish, on the right, we have English, went to the market to buy apples, they returned home. Okay, so now, the reason we put these in phrases is now there's context there. Went to the market. So, even if you don't know mercado, when you're reviewing this, fue al, went to, well, there's only so many words that that could be, right? Went to, especially if you know that the video, let's say this video that day you consumed is about Kevin going to the grocery store with his mom. Well, if you know the title of that video, let's say Kevin va al supermercado con su madre. So, let's say that's the name of the video, you're going to know, oh, mercado, supermercado, mercado, market, okay. Comprar manzanas. You don't know the verb comprar but you know the word manzanas. So, you know, okay, something, apples. Well, there's only so many things that Kevin could have done with the apples. Comprar las manzanas. We have regresaron a casa. So, there's only so many things they could do home, right? They returned home. So, when you have this context, it really makes it easy to recall. Now, how do you go about recalling these? Every day, you know, two minutes, three minutes, a few times a day, you could be sitting on the toilet, hanging out, doing whatever you're doing, sitting in a car, sitting on your couch, have a small notebook, keep it in your pocket, pull it out and just randomly open up the page. I mean randomly open up the journal and check a few words, see if you got them right. Cover one side, cover the English side and guess like, okay, for el mercado, what's the word mercado? And you'll know what it means. And when you get really good, you'll be able to cover the Spanish side, read in English and then recall what the Spanish word was. That's a little harder. It's a little easier to read the Spanish and guess the English word because we have more English words in our mind because it's our native language for most of us watching my videos but when you cover the Spanish side, it's a little harder to do but what you should be doing is practicing doing both ways. Sometimes you cover the one side, the English side, sometimes you cover the Spanish side and you are actively practicing this active recall a few times a day. It doesn't have to be long, one, two, three minutes a few times a day, maybe two or three times a day. So if you could do two minutes three times a day, you're good. Random times of the day, keep it random. And that's really going to help you with spaced repetition which is one of the best ways to recall and retain new vocabulary words and expand your vocabulary words. So the simple formula to really expand your vocabulary is consuming a lot of Spanish finding words that are new to you writing those words down in these phrases, in the form of phrases, putting them in your journal or notebook or iPhone like whatever you want to do, it's just easier with a journal and then actively recalling them over the weeks and months and that's how you expand your vocabulary. Now if you want to get real advanced with this, I still recommend you do the journal but you can also put these words into Anki or any sort of notecard app and where they have sort of the recall reviews programmed algorithmically to where it'll show you a certain notecard based on when you put it in your database and then based on how you answered it, it'll show you it again if you got it right, it'll delay it. They have some crazy technology that can really help with this but hey, what I recommend you just keep it simple, that's what I like to do, keep it simple, simple journal, pen, pencil, that's it. And that's really all it takes to really build a large database in your brain of Spanish words and as you actively recall them and as you're constantly consuming new content, you're going to be exposed to those same words over and over and that's when they really start getting ingrained into your brain and then you don't have to translate them in your head when you hear them because you already know what they mean and that is when you are on your way to fluency. So that right there is the only thing you really need to do to expand your vocabulary. Of course, there's other things you can do to continue to improve your Spanish but when speaking just on expanding vocabulary, this is really the only thing you need to do and again, you can do this with any piece of content, YouTube videos, podcasts, audio books with the Kindle book, whatever. Whatever you want to do, the main thing is you have the text and I highly recommend you have the voice. But yeah, so I hope you found that video helpful. If you did, do me a big favor, hit the thumbs up for me, comment below, let me know what else you need help with. Last but not least, please do not forget to subscribe to the channel, turn on notifications so you never miss another video. Until the next time, you know, speak Spanish.