How to Improve Your Spanish Vocabulary without Spending Too Much
Vocabulary is the number of words that a person can use correctly in a certain language. Vocabulary is built up by repeatedly encountering and using a certain word in everyday speech.
Having a strong vocabulary is important in practicing and learning a new language, because the size of one’s vocabulary is indicative of one’s skill and level of education in the language.
Vocabulary is one of the things included in any curriculum teaching the Spanish language. Teachers devise certain kinds of exercises and tests that are aimed to teach students new words, and to help them remember those. As the lessons run their course, the students build up their vocabularies gradually.
People who are self-studying the language are usually left to their own devices to find ways of improving their vocabularies. Luckily, there are websites that show self-teachers how to improve their Spanish vocabulary without spending too much.
Online Vocabulary Exercises
With easy access to and the rising popularity of the Internet, most self-studying linguists would naturally turn to it as a primary medium to find the needed exercises to build up their vocabularies.
Websites that offer vocabulary-building exercises usually have these tests taking the form of games. Each game is usually specific to a certain lesson like parts of speech (itself divided into the different parts of speech in Spanish), sentence construction, and many others.
One website offers these types of tests:
Filling the Blanks
In this test, one is presented with a sentence that has a gap somewhere in it. The user then has to put in the correct word into the blank. It even allows a user to get a clue for the answer.
Matching Type
In this test, you have to match the items on the right (which are English words) with their corresponding Spanish translation on the left column.
Jumbled Sentences
The user has to arrange a sentence into its correct order, using his knowledge of Spanish sentence construction and the parts of speech.
Advantages and Disadvantages of These Exercises
These exercises offer the student the luxury of building up his Spanish vocabulary for free. He does not have to take up lessons with a teacher, which at most instances cost a lot of money and time. These exercises also offer a student flexibility and convenience when studying the language. He could learn at his own pace and be able to review at will the lessons that he might have forgotten if he has not studied for a considerable amount of time.
However, one of the main disadvantages of these exercises is that they do not take into account the level of learning of the student. Unlike a teacher, who structures his vocabulary tests according to the words and sentences that he has taught the student, these exams are generic. They may feature words that the student has not encountered in his study.
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