Guest post: Making Connections

Photo by Karine Avetisyan on Unsplash

Short intro from me, Jen Degenhardt

I met Jennifer Jin at the SWSW conference in March where I was representing one of my other companies, Moneyling. We got to chatting (I'm good at that!) and everything that has evolved since has been organic. It is my pleasure to allow Jennifer to introduce herself and her product. I believe in language and all things entrepreneurial, so give this a read and check out what she's building at the link she includes at the end. And please feel free to pass along this post to anyone who may benefit.

Happy Teaching!

Making Connections by Jennifer Jin est. reading time 4 min

I met Jennifer Degenhardt in Austin at SXSW. Everyone says this conference is great for networking, but I couldn’t believe it when she stopped me to chat and mentioned she was a Spanish teacher and lifelong educator! When I told her I was working on a Spanish learning website, she gave me her contact information so we could stay in touch. I want to thank her for giving me a place here to talk about a faster way to learn Spanish words, something my husband and I think a lot about.

It’s something that came about from the frustration of thinking, “How are there so many words to learn, and how do I remember them all?” There’s all kinds of great methods for how to increase your exposure to Spanish after you’ve already learned some words, whether that’s through repetition, reading words in context, or watching videos. But we wanted to focus on the initial learning of a word, which is the method by which you get it into your head and have it stick.

The way we do this is by connecting Spanish words to words you already know. For example, “dormir” means “to sleep.” But it’s easier to think of the similar-sounding English word “dorm” which is already related to sleeping, rather than memorizing it cold. 

This learning method isn’t new. In fact, it’s widely used in both medical and nursing school, which is where my husband first encountered it as a medical student. 

Language learning and medicine seem like an unlikely duo – except it isn’t. Just like learning a language, medicine has hundreds of biochemical pathways, proteins, diseases, all of which you are expected to memorize in a short amount of time. Similarly, Spanish has tens of thousands of words, and you need to know at least a couple hundred just to be able to understand the basics.

Here’s how medical students learn: instead of memorizing a disease and each symptom individually which feels random, they memorize a picture. Each item in the picture represents something to do with the disease, like a symptom or biochemical pathway, all tied together with a cohesive story. The picture items sound similar to the things they represent, so it’s easy to associate them together. The story is usually based around something everyone is familiar with, like Spongebob or Captain Crunch cereal.

These medical students are using a proven method called rich encoding, where you add structure and context to what you’re learning so it’s easier to remember. So when we started learning Spanish, we got really focused on tying each Spanish word to something familiar, because we saw how much faster it was to learn this way.

We’ve found that the best familiar words to tie Spanish words to are actually English words. A lot of people know that “oficina” sounds like “office.” Not a lot of people know that “mirar” means “to look” but sounds like “mirror,” or that “caballo” means “horse” but sounds like “cavalry.” These connections aren’t random and are based on the shared Latin history between the languages, so you can literally comb through the etymology and find these words.

We’ve compiled these connections for a lot of words already. To see if we’ve done a word you’re trying to learn, you can look it up at BuenoSpanish.com. We hope you find it as useful as we have.