Where to start?
That’s a difficult question, whether starting a project like this or, in fact, starting to learn a new language.
Many people dip their toes into learning Spanish with apps like Duolingo and Memrise, and that’s perfectly fine. Trying to learn by picking up the core vocabulary makes sense.
This is the method I used, too, when I began my own epic odyssey of trying to master the Spanish language. And those apps have their benefits; they are well-designed and fun. But are they effective? Well, the jury is still out on that one.
Personally, I found that even when I’d worked through all the levels of Duolingo, it was still difficult to remember the words I’d learned or to understand what Spanish speakers were saying when I encountered the real language with all its wonderful variations.
The problem is: there are tonnes of words to learn in Spanish. There are over 300,000 words in the standard Spanish dictionary.
So how do you go about building a core vocabulary?
The 1,000 most common words...
You’ve probably seen statistics like this:
Learning the most common 1,000 words in Spanish will mean you can comprehend 89% of all speech.
Learning the top 2,000 words will get you to 93% comprehension.
While I’m not doubting that learning these words will be helpful to your progress, it still takes a lot of time to learn 2,000 words in a new language.
You may have also read a statistic that:
To become conversationally fluent in Spanish, you will need to learn around 10,000 words.
Trust me, learning 10,000 words one at a time using flashcards and dictionaries is an arduous and inefficient task (I should know, I spent months trying to learn this way).
But what if I told you that all you have to do is learn just 19 simple patterns in Spanish, which will unlock approximately 15,000 Spanish words that you already know?
Considering you supposedly only need 10,000 words to be conversationally fluent, that’s a pretty good start on your journey to fluency.
What are Cognates anyway?
Cognates are sets of words in different languages inherited from another root language.
In English, around 60% of the words have roots in Greek or Latin, and approximately 25% have Germanic roots.
Britain was invaded so many times over the centuries that English became a hybrid of several older languages.
And there are literally thousands of words in Spanish that are very similar to familiar words we use every single day in English.
Let’s have a look at some examples:
Can you understand these simple Spanish sentences?
El doctor está en el hospital.
Es una situación difícil.
Mi color favorito es el gris.
Necesito preparar mis notas.
(Okay, I guess “el gris/ the grey” is a shade rather than a colour, but you get the idea).
These are all pretty easy to understand, right?
Let’s look at this sentence in more detail:
Es una situación difícil.
While written differently, the word situación is almost identical to the English word situation.
This is because most words that end “-tion” in English will end “-ción” in Spanish.
And this Cognate Pattern alone will help unlock over 1,250 words almost instantly.
For example, the word “preparation” becomes “preparación.”
There are two other great things about this Cognate Pattern.
These words ending -ción are almost always feminine, so they will be “la” (instead of “el”) or “una” (instead of “un”), which means one less thing to think about when constructing your sentences.
With another simple trick, these nouns (or naming words) like preparación can be converted into verbs (or doing words) by removing the -ción and adding an “r” onto the end. For example, “preparar” means “to prepare”.
I will go deeper into this “-ción” Cognate Pattern in a future post.
But for now, I’ll whet your appetite by telling you that there are thousands of other words that are identical (like “doctor” and “hospital”) or very close to their English counterparts (like “situación” and “favorito”).
A caveat…
Learning these 15,000 words alone will not be enough to make you fluent in Spanish.
However, becoming familiar with the 19 Cognate Patterns will help you build your vocabulary—and, more importantly, your confidence—once you do take the dive and start speaking Spanish.
I’ve outlined a few of these patterns above, but 19 Cognate Patterns is way too much for one post, so I will be delving into each of them in more detail over the coming weeks.
¡Nos vemos pronto, chicos!
Great post -- made me want to start learning Spanish immediately! I hadn't realised until reading this how many words I already knew. Can't wait for the next instalment...
Muy útil, gracias!!