How to remember vocabulary learned in Spanish

The trick is word families.

How on earth was my GCSE Spanish student meant to remember the word disculparse?

The obvious link is to the interjection “Disculpa!” but she didn’t know that either, so then I would have ended up saddling her with two new words instead of one. I took a moment to think this one through. And then it clicked.

“If someone is guilty of something, there’s another word we can use instead. Do you know the word ‘culpable’?”

“Yes”, she replied, convincingly. I usually avoid such closed questions but we were nearing the end of the session and needed to make quick progress.

“Ok, so we recognise that ‘culpa’ is the Latin word for fault or blame. You also know that ‘dis’ is a negative prefix, so we’re trying to take away blame now- in other words, to apologise.”

To some of you, this is blindingly obvious; to others, this may be a eureka moment.

Either way, I’m sure that you won’t forget this word moving forwards. Indeed, these links are key to learning and, crucially, retaining vocabulary in any foreign language. Otherwise, words become too compartmentalised in our minds, and we’re all familiar with knowing that you’ve put something in a drawer but not knowing where to find it. Likewise, one often experiences this feeling with words that one recognises but cannot remember the meaning of.

It’s by no means necessary to be an etymology expert in order to succeed with this strategy; one can get by with very simple links. Take the adjective fuerte- beginners may draw a blank and the translation, strong, bears no obvious resemblance to its Spanish counterpart. Yet we’ve all heard of forts being used to defend troops. We’ve all read the claim on the back of the cereal box that those Rice Krispies are fortified with extra vitamins and minerals, thus making us stronger. Now I can link fuerte to a more familiar English word, which makes me much likelier to remember it. I can then explore the family of related Spanish words too, such as fortaleza (strength) and fuerza (force). Admittedly, I may not remember all of these related ones, though I’ll certainly recognise the shared root and then think of a roughly accurate translation whenever I encounter these words again.

Luckily, Spanish abounds with cognates thanks to the invasion of the English language by Norman words with Latin derivations in the Middle Ages. I cannot thus claim with any confidence that my tip can be extrapolated to learning Mandarin, though the point about word families within the language itself will no doubt still stand.