learning vocabulary
Is there a good way to learn nouns? Just rote memory?
6 Answers
Nouns are easy to learn. Put a sticky note with the Spanish noun on everything in your house. Then use the newspaper fliers and catalogs. You can test yourself by naming everything in a store flier. Hardware, tools, department, grocery, etc.
Yeah, just rote memorization. But you can get a leg up by paying close attention to the things you say everyday in English and make a list of those words. Learn them cold and then begin to add words as you encounter them in real life or reading.
But look on the bright side. Nouns are the first word group that children learn. If they can do it so can we.
Remember that knowing nouns in your head is different from being able to say & hear and use them. As you use flashcards, always say them out loud and check with a Spanish speaker to make sure you are pronouncing them in an understandable way. As you look at the word, think of an image of the word in your mind. The more senses you use to learn, the more your memory will be apt to keep it in long-term memory. SD has a great option in the dictionary in that it has a sound icon to pronounce the sounds of most words. Another important thing to remember when learning nouns is to always say the articles as you learn them. Because Spanish has gender for nouns, adjectives, etc., you have got to know if it's feminine or masculine. Playing some of the word games that are in the Q&A section of this site has helped me.
Here's a start. Try all the helps above and see if you remember this noun tomorrow:
Una rana
Or you could play "lotería", a Mexican play of chance, simliar to bingo, but using a deck of cards instead of numbers on ping pong balls. Every image has a name. Each player has at least one board with a 4 X 4 grid of images with their corresponding name. Each board has a different selection of images.
The deck consists of 54 different images, each one in a card. To start de game the caller randomly selects a card from the deck and announces it by its name, sometimes using a riddle instead of reading the card name. The players with a similar icon on their board mark it off with a chip (ussually a bean). The first player who fills the board shouts "¡Lotería!" and is the winner.
You can find the names of the images and the riddles in this site:
Great answers above already. Also look at the flashcards on this site, or over at memrise.com Very helpful.
I tirelessly continue to advocate for people to transcribe a novel in the foreign language while translating it also to your language.
No memorizing, flashcards or anything, until it dawns on you, that you don't have a problem in understanding the language. You will acquire (translate what you already in your language) the other language without really having a clear cut on how you did it, other than having to look for a lot on the dictionary, but even that begins to fade away in fairly short time...
Edit: I posted this, because I always try to make it a point that when it comes to learning a language, people pretty soon devises "techniques" on how to remember words etc... and my usual question is:
Do you really do all that when you learn a new word in your own language?
Someone mentioned "simplicity", which is not the same as to say "simpleton", you see?
;-D
