Mastering Spanish Vocabulary

"So a book like this is definitely not the kind of book you want to read start to finish. It is essentially just a list of words. But the power of this book is if you have certain conversations you know that you’re likely to have, then you can flick ahead to that category. This has been great for me. I used an earlier print of this very book when I first moved to Spain , a few months into my project when, for instance, I needed to find a new flat. Then, I went to the accommodation section, and saw a very simple list of all the words related to what I would need to know in terms of floor space, and how high the rent would be. So: just words like ‘rent,’ and ‘apartment,’ and ‘door,’ and so on. It’s better than a dictionary, because they’re all collected by category, and won’t overwhelm people with the amount of words that they don’t know. Based on your background, there are certain words you’re going to need more than others. As an engineer, my first job in Spain was related to engineering. So I needed to know technical words a lot quicker than I needed to know, for instance, the names of countries. On a generic list of vocabulary, you tend to hear what the translation of country names are a lot faster than you would technical words for parts of a computer. That makes sense for the vast majority of people, but your particular case is going to be different to somebody else’s. Each individual needs to learn the vocabulary that’s relevant to them. I needed to learn how to talk about my travels, I needed to learn how to talk about Ireland in particular, I needed to talk about technical things related to my job. Again, as a beginner, you don’t want to be worrying too much about grammar. It’s fine if you’re choppily saying stuff like: ‘Supermarket, where?’ instead of piecing together a perfect sentence. You can do so much more with more words, and that’s why a book like this can be so helpful."