Tracking My Spanish Learning — Why My Vocabulary Suddenly Exploded
Look at the above two graphs. See something weird? I kept reading roughly the same amount of words per day but suddenly my vocabulary expanded a lot. Why is that?
Start very narrow
When first learning a language, it’s a good idea to start very narrow. Stick to one or two topics that you already know well.
This ensures that you’ll start understanding full texts quickly. I started reading news articles about the Ukraine war and software. I didn’t try to read also about politics in general or tech or hardware in general. I would have just gotten overwhelmed.
And note that I especially picked the news. News articles have a predictable format and it’s quite repetitive (intro and conclusion repeat the contents) which is excellent for language learning.
Expand carefully
Over time, I started adding more topics. About software in general. About politics in general. Then about health etc.
But I stuck with the same type of content — news articles. I then already had the basic vocabulary and I was familiar with the format in Spanish.
Add new content types (genres)
At some point I realized that I don’t make that much progress anymore — there were hardly any new words in any of the news articles I was interested in.
So, I switched to reading fiction — I had to actually develop the functionality for Lingo Champion (my app) to be able to process ebooks for that. And that was the big jump you saw on the graph earlier.
Where next?
I guess it’s pretty logical all-in-all. It’s just cool to see it actually play out in real life and being able to track it.
I still have ways to go with fiction — there are different styles etc. And I’m still quite far away from being able to read poetry. But I do feel I’m making good progress. Plus reading news articles has given me a pretty solid base for understanding what’s going in Mexico and Spain.
