Visual Vocabulary

The concept is simple. Just pick a Spanish language word and imagine it as related to something familiar and then try to remember this visual key to the new word’s meaning. The visual association thus created has been empirically proven to stay in memory more permanently and more readily available for instant recall. If you are learning Spanish, or any language in the world, you will soon find that this trick is indispensable for an extremely easy Spanish vocabulary acquisition. Sounds too simplistic to be true? This article discusses the concept of visualization at length, illustrating it with some interesting examples.

The nuts and bolts of visualization

Take the Spanish word, excusado (toilet) for instance. Just visualize a naughty little kid asking his teacher, “Excuse me, I want to do it in the toilet!” This way, every time you hear excusado, you will also recall this visual aid and get the meaning instantly. No more mugging up!

Spanish vocabulary with visualization

Photo credit: Bianca Cecot licensed CC BY-SA 2.0

Simple, isn’t it? But, excusado was too simple an example. I mean, it already sounds too similar to something familiar in English and that made the visual correlation a cakewalk. Can this trick be used on all foreign words? We’ll see. Let’s take another example, a more unfamiliar-sounding word this time: Arroz (rice). Now arroz doesn’t sound similar to anything in English. Or, does it? If we expand our visual landscape beyond arroz and rice, we can easily draw a more familiar picture. Here, you can imagine camping in a medieval wildlife reserve having a cup of instant rice when some illegal poacher suddenly starts shooting arrows at you mistaking you for, say, a boar. The more vivid your imagination, the better your retention.

Got the idea? Mentally associating a foreign word to a known imagery or thing to memorize the meaning. This is no rocket-science, friends, and it shouldn’t surprise you to know that this is how most of us learned difficult words in our native languages when we were kids! This is not my invention. This is not even a discovery. I am just recycling a very commonplace concept after enjoying its benefits first-hand while learning Spanish myself. Listed in the following section are a few more Spanish palabras (words) along with visual cues.

Examples of visualization

Blanco (white) - The white, snow covered peak of Mont Blanc

Amarillo (yellow) - A yellow armadillo; the rhyming endings should be sufficient visual hook

Nevado (snowy) - Mont Blanc or Sierra Nevada, snow is everywhere

Soleado (sunny) - Imagine a bright, sunny day and a small villa with huge solar panel installed on the rooftop, shining in sunlight

Calor (hot) - Calorie, heat...rings a bell?

Fresco (cool) - Picture yourself in your balcony, enjoying the fresh and cool evening air!

Helado (freezing) - It was a freezing rainy night and there was a sudden hailstorm and you had nowhere to hide

Viento (wind) - A well-ventilated room feels windier

Esposo/a (husband/wife) – We all know what a spouse is, don’t we?

A word of caution

While it might get quite tempting to include examples like the ones illustrated above in your own vocabulary-building regimen, I would personally advise against such practice. The reason is more common-sense than linguistics or science. The thing is, these visual cues are my own. I am the one who imagined them and built those mental bridges and hence the cues are, in more ways than one, personal to me. No, I am not going to claim any copyright or demand any royalty against every word you learn using my cues. But the fact that these are personal to me means they might not have the same efficacy in your context. Our minds work differently and what might be a visual aid to my mind might be an alien idea to your and forcing your brain to assimilate an image that it didn’t invent in the first place might be the equivalent of learning by rote. Not the best outcome.

What I suggest, instead, is that you invent your own visual cues well-adapted for your own context. This will ensure you do not have to depend on someone else’s imagination. In fact, your brain might have an even better image than the one illustrated here, who knows? I am not saying, you cannot use the illustrations I have made. Just don’t depend on them. Ask yourself. If you feel comfortable taking it as is, go ahead. However, if you feel any discomfort accepting my visuals, maybe you need a more familiar adaptation. That’s where your imagination needs to take over. And believe you me, it’s not at all difficult! Sky is the limit when it comes to what you can accomplish, right from Spanish bathroom words to Spanish body parts!

So, what do you think about this little trick? See any potential? I did. And so did many, many others. Used the right way, this simple device could help you add dozens of new words to your mental dictionary every day without any cramming-up. If you really feel this article is comment-worthy, please feel free to let me know how you adapted these illustrations to your specific contexts and used them in learning Spanish more rapidly. There’s a lot we can learn from each other!