Field Notes for Spanish Learners: Vocabulary

According to my notes, by late June I felt “functionally, conversationally fluent” in Spanish. "Fluent" doesn't mean "perfect" or "native-like." Instead, "functionally, conversationally fluent" suggests that I can be in any situation and talk my way through it. I might mess up and say stupid stuff, but I will definitely survive.

My Castellano phrasebook was motivated by the observation that spoken language is 70% responding to what other people say, and only 30% producing original speech. In a given conversation, therefore, you spend the majority of the time saying things like "Oh, great! Cool! OK, yeah... Of course..." To be a good conversationalist, you need to expand your stock of natural-sounding phrases. The phrasebook is a small attempt to do that.

There's still that 30% of the time, though, where you have to express your own ideas. To deal with those moments, you need to expand your vocabulary to cover more situations.

What's tough about producing original speech is, your vocabulary will have grown naturally in a few areas that get constant use when living in a foreign country:

House and home (words and phrases for eating, sleeping, cooking, throwing things out...)
Business (words and phrases for buying stuff, numbers...)
Asking directions (words and phrases to ask for help on the bus, in the street...)

To move one step closer toward the goal of approximating native speech, however, you'll need to put some effort into developing a couple more areas:

Filler or “pause” words (uh, I mean, you know, like...)
Vague adjectives that convey emotion (cool, nice, great, weird...)

To develop natural-sounding speech faster, first identify and then assimilate the little nonsense words that fill up so much of everyday speech in any language.

If you want to conduct business or give lectures in a foreign language, this approach won't be very useful. If instead you're looking to hang out with people and sound natural, I recommend you use it.

Now that you know what vocabulary you need, how do you learn it?

Make flash cards. It's a much better method than just writing up a long list of words to memorize. (Interestingly, flash cards don't seem to be all that widely familiar in Uruguay.)
I've always made my own flash cards by cutting up index cards, but since this is the 21st century, you might want to try SuperMemo, Vis-Ed (free), or VTrain ($25 but apparently very user-friendly), which you could use on your cellphone or computer.

Besides making flashcards, I also bought myself a little pocket notepad in Uruguay, which I always had on me so I could record new words and idioms as soon as they came up in conversation. This may have come across kind of strange, although sometimes I tried to be subtle by writing on my hand instead of whipping out a notepad all the time.

Don't be afraid to explicitly ask what a word means, whether you're listening or conversing.
Also, drawing from other language learning advice websites, I recommend increasing your vocabulary by reading texts that are slightly more challenging than you're comfortable with, as well as deliberately learning the most common words in the language first, using statistical lists like this one.

Appendix
6/14/10
I've noticed that vocabulary acquisition breaks down into a few categories.

1. Random words and phrases that inexplicably stick in your head
   (yuyo, "herb", pasarla bomba, "to have a blast")
2. Words and phrases you comprehend, but don't know well enough to use yourself (inodoro, "toilet")
3. Words and phrases you’ve noticed popping up a lot, but haven't figured out their exact meaning or proper usage (no más, "just"—as in "just take a seat")
4. Words you don’t even notice because you haven’t learned them yet; you are blissfully unaware of their presence

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