A set of 1,000 essential Spanish words is now available in the Knowledge Store!

Hi guys!

I’m thrilled to share with you the set of 1,000 most essential Spanish words prepared together with the Repetitool team. This is a special moment for two reasons - I am not only sharing with you the great set of words we’ve been working on throughout the last year, but opening a series of free educational material which will be available later in the Repetitool’s Knowledge store. 

Why am I so excited to present you this set? 

First, the set contains 1,000 frequently used Spanish words, including around 500 nouns and 200 adjectives, 162 verbs, more than 50 adverbs, as well as common numerals, prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, and exclamations, making it an excellent resource for learning Spanish. 

This set is neither rocket science, nor made for academic or technical usage. Instead, it covers most of the typical day-to-day vocabulary across various topics: people, emotions, objects and places, daily activities and so on. When creating it, we were driven by my need to learn Spanish, first and foremost, for daily life and basic social interactions. Despite living in Spain, I work in an international centre with colleagues from different countries and all official communication set in English. So I struggled with finding the right resource that would help me to tackle the daily routine in Spanish. I’ve tested quite a few things on my way of learning Spanish. It deserves to be a separate story, which I plan to share with you in the blog, so follow us and stay tuned for the new posts! Finally, all my struggles have led to this particular list of words which I already verified and studied myself. And I am especially happy and proud every moment when I notice the words I learned in the context around me -  when walking on the street, or listening to my favourite spanish radio, or seeing them in a typical courier’s message about my parcel. It's so rewarding to know that we’ve hit the right nail to the head with this set! 

So, let me tell you a bit more about the features that make this set truly exceptional:

✔️  First, each page of this set contains the information regarding part of speech. Note, we call them pages instead of flashcards, because each page in the Repetitool app can accommodate much more useful information than any other simple flashcard. When you open the page, you see a note if a Spanish word is a noun or a verb, or something else, because different parts of speech have their own synonyms and are used differently in the context. In addition, you will see if the pair (or the “answer” in Spanish behind the curtain as we call it) is a single word or a phrase. Do not be surprised that a single English word, when translated into Spanish, may become a phrase of two or more words, such as tonight (one word) - esta noche (two words). So this information will help you recall a correct pair from your long-term memory when repeating. 

✔️  Next, all Spanish nouns are presented together with their definite articles, which I found very helpful. You’ve probably heard that articles are crucial in Spanish, and often confusing to the learners, including myself, so memorizing all nouns together with their corresponding articles helps avoid mistakes starting from day 1. Based on our experience, daily repetition of nouns paired with articles makes the memorizing process way more efficient, especially in the cases of exceptions.

✔️  Another unique feature of this set - it contains common synonyms in both English and Spanish. By repeating them daily, you can significantly expand your active vocabulary,  building connections between new words through their synonyms. We always recommend reading quickly all synonyms before saying the answer and opening the curtain. There is also a practical reason behind - by memorizing more and more new words every day, you will surely reach a point when your vocabulary will grow with a large number of synonyms. So looking at the synonyms listed on the page you can help your brain to recall the correct pair in each repetition. This process might not be so obvious at the beginning, but you will encounter such situations when your vocabulary will reach several hundreds of Spanish words.

✔️ The set contains Spanish verbs in the infinitive form, to help you memorise their meaning at first. Verbs are central to Spanish grammar, and require an extensive practicing of tenses, moods, and conjugations, which are way more broad than in English. After memorizing the meaning, you can continue practicing their conjugations in different tenses. For this purpose, we are preparing separate sets dedicated to verb tenses, based on the verbs from the first 1,000 Spanish words set. They will be available in the Knowledge store later this year, so do not forget to check the store for updates regularly!

Great news - when learning this set, you will notice many cognates - Spanish words that are very similar to their English counterparts. They share the identical (digital - digital) or similar spelling (fantastic - fantástico) and meaning due to the close connections between English and the Roman languages. This similarity can significantly speed up your language acquisition. You just need to learn and practice the different pronunciation of cognates using the text-to-speech feature integrated in the Repetitool app, and its adaptive spaced repetition techniques will facilitate memorizing of hard and dissimilar words by repeating them regularly. 

And a few important things I’d like to point out. 

🟠    Of course, you should not expect any “magic” when starting learning these words. As it always happens with any new vocabulary, by just memorising it by heart you will not be able to start speaking Spanish all at once or be able to listen to a podcast or watch Netflix. These are all separate skills that you need to train and practice hard every day to get propelled in your Spanish. But, for instance, this set will give a good basis of the most frequently-used vocabulary. You can use it as a set of “building blocks” to practice speaking and listening skills more efficiently, not spending time on searching for a translation for every word while you start learning Spanish. 

🟠       As I mentioned earlier, we are preparing a series of sets to cover 3,000 Spanish words. Based on our experience and gathered statistics, the full series of 3,000 words can be memorized in a year. I’d like to give you an example: I’ve learned this set of 1,000 words in 5 months by adding only 10 new words to my daily repetition plan using the Repetitool app (200 words per month), and I roughly spent no more than 15-20 minutes per day on this. When I could allocate more time for learning a foreign language besides a full-time job and a personal life, about 45 to 60 minutes per day, I memorized more than 500 new words in a month, also repeating all others in my active vocabulary. This intensive training I completed on the second set of 1,000 words which is now in preparation for the Knowledge store. That said, it is up to you to allocate the time (which is the most hard and important part!), then, set up the pace you can comfortably follow, and the Repetitool app will help you memorize the new vocabulary more effectively! 

🟠       You will notice that our concept of memorizing new vocabulary is built around native language words, not vice versa. Usually, the learners are offered to study new vocabulary in a classic way like when using printed dictionaries - first read the word in a foreign language and then memorize its translation in a native language. Indeed, this classic approach helps in acquiring reading and translation skills, but it is less effective in other cases, especially in speaking. We encourage you to try our approach - memorize new words based on your native language. First you see a word in English, then stimulate your brain to recall a desired word in Spanish and connect it with synonyms, which enriches your active vocabulary. However, if you prefer to follow the classic approach (foreign word - translation into your native language), in the Repetitool app you can easily “flip” the set to Spanish-English and learn it as you wish. 

We will give you more details about the nuances of memorization techniques, spaced repetition and all features of the Repetitool app in our blog and Youtube channel. I also plan to share my experience of learning foreign languages with you , so if you are interested to know more, check the links, stay connected, subscribe and share your thoughts and experience with us! 

Author: Anastasia Mikhalchan

Anastasia holds a PhD in STEM and is a full-time scientist with a research career spanning the University of Cambridge and NUS. She is an author of over 50 scientific publications, serves as a scientific reviewer for journals of Elsevier, Springer Nature, and The Royal Society of Chemistry publishing houses, regularly speaks at international conferences and collaborates with teams across the globe. Having lived and worked in the UK, Singapore, and now Spain, she understands the importance of communicating effectively across cultures and languages. Fluent (C1/C2) in English, currently learning Spanish and starting with French as a hobby, Anastasia uses the Repetitool app every day to memorize new vocabulary and experiment firsthand with spaced repetition algorithms. As a scientist with a demanding career, she is well aware of the practical needs and challenges in balancing work and personal life with language learning. Together with the Repetitool team, she works to make language learning both effective and accessible for all learners, even those with the busiest schedules.