How I'm Building My Spanish Vocabulary with My Amazon Kindle Paperwhite, Contributed by @Shenanigator

I've written on this topic before but wanted to give an update on my progress. A while back, I felt like my Spanish learning was going nowhere; I felt like a wasn't making any progress. I even felt like I was regressing. However, I think that was just because we were in a new city (Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico) which seems to have a more difficult dialect to understand than most other cities in Mexico.

Yesterday, after spending 10 nights in Guanajuato, GTO, Mexico we arrived in Guadalajara once again. We've had a few more opportunities to talk to people in Spanish here and it already seems easier to understand than it was less than two weeks ago.

Why is there such a noticeable difference?

Since I felt like I wasn't making any progress, I started reading in Spanish.

---

---

Before this, I was doing audio lessons almost exclusively. I think audio lessons like the ones I was doing (Pimsleur and Rocket Languages) are great because they get you comfortable with Speaking the language. They also help tremendously to make you sound like a native speaker. However, I've found that they can only take you so far and eventually you'll hit a plateau.

I found this great book in the Kindle store called 2000 Most Common Spanish Words in Context. It's not an exciting book by any means but it has been an excellent resource to expand my Spanish vocabulary.

---

---

The book quotes a study that showed that if you know the 2,000 most common Spanish words, you'll be able to understand 92.7% of all oral speech.

It lists the words in order from 1-2,000 of the most commonly used Spanish words. It tells you what it means, uses it in an English sentence, and has the same sentence in Spanish.

---

---

I've been taking this book very slowly and learning every single word in the book. I already knew every one of the "Most-used words" so far but the way this book is really helping me is learning every word in each sentence. In the process, I'm expanding my vocabulary a lot, learning to spell, exposing my mind to how the words are written, and learning new verb tenses.

The above photo, for example, has "The children have been playing" translated to "Los niños han estado jugando." The most difficult part of this sentence is the past tense with "Have been playing" or "Han estado jugando." Learning these verb conjugations is really helping to accelerate my Spanish education.

Both my girlfriend and I are starting to see words all over the place that we just read and learned from this book. We think that once we learn every word in this book (not just the top 2,000), our Spanish will be much more advanced!

What are your favorite ways to help YOU learn a new language?