Palabritas del día

In my ongoing quest to learn Spanish (since mid-October 2004), I’ve been working especially on vocabulary these days, trying to learn about ten words per day. It really adds up — I’ve been going since early September and have collected almost 500 words since then. To be fair, I already knew some of them, but probably dos tercios de ellas son nuevas para mi…

How am I learning this? Well, I have a book, Uso interactivo del vocabulario from Edelsa, which I’m working my way through. It has many chapters on different topics. So far I’ve worked through “El cuerpo humano”, “La familia” and “Los viajes” (you can see where my interests lie!) and now I’m slugging through the longest chapter, “Los alimentos”.

The other part of my método is to use the simple but very effective “flashcard” software called Genius (only for Mac, but I’m sure there are similar great programs for PC). Many thanks to John Chang for writing that! Each day, I go through my ten words, look up the definitions, write them in the book and then enter them into the Genius file I’m creating for that chapter. Then I quiz myself repeatedly on the chapter until I’ve gotten all those new words right at least seven or eight times (meanwhile, it is also interspersing older words into the quiz). I also regularly open up the previous chapters I’ve learned and quiz myselves a few times on those. It is a bit overwhelming, and some days are much better than others, but I’ve learned a huge amount already with this system (though for sure I still won’t always think of the word I need when I need it, even if I “know” it!).

For dictionaries, I’m using the Larousse Pocket Spanish-English (aka “El Pequeño”) as well as the Oxford Spanish Dictionary (aka “El Grande”). I also use online sites like RAE and

Update (Jan. 5, 2006): Recently I’ve almost exclusively been using the WordReference.com dictionaries. They are very fast and give useful translations. Of course the RAE is still a key tool to help with subtleties, but you can even get to RAE through WordReference.com, now.

I’m not going to toss all these words onto the site, but, de vez en cuando, I will occasionally toss up colloquial expressions I find funny or interesting, which are based on some of the words I’m learning for that day… So I’ll use these words in sentences, but hopefully they’ll be a bit unusual. Let’s get started and you’ll see what I mean! Si cometo errores en mis frases, ¡por favor corrígeme!

el jamón — ham
Dice que ha volado en el Concorde… ¡y un jamón con chorreras! — He says he’s flown in the Concorde… sure he has, right! (sarcastically, as in “tell me one I haven’t heard!”) Literally, “and a frilly ham!”, I think, though a chorrera can also be a small waterfall. Maybe it’s more like “when pigs fly!”

la lechuga — lettuce
¡Eres más fresco que una lechuga! — You have a lot of nerve! Literally, “you’re fresher than lettuce!”

las lentejas — lentils
Y ahora ¿qué voy a hacer para ganarme las lentejas? — And now, what will I do to earn a living? Literally, “how will I earn my lentils?”, similar to how “beans” can mean money in English.