Ep 01: About the Podcast

Episode Transcript

Hi everybody! Welcome to the Vocabulary in Spanish and Other Languages podcast. This is a podcast where you can learn vocabulary in Spanish and other languages.

The episodes are short and simple, and they come with a supplemental vocabulary lesson that you can view to help you learn the vocabulary and make sure that you know what each word means. The vocabulary page includes all the vocabulary with pictures and their equivalents in English. You will be able to find the link to the vocabulary webpage on the show notes of the episode that you are listening to.

I am Joel Zárate. I am your host. I am your Spanish instructor and guide to accompany you in your journey to help you learn vocabulary in Spanish and other languages. In this first episode, I’m going tell you about the podcast, the goal of the podcast, the concept behind the podcast, and a little bit about myself.

Alright! This podcast is mostly for beginners and intermediate learners to help you guys build your vocabulary. There will be two versions for every episode. One for complete beginners or low beginners where you’ll hear each word pronounced once slowly and once at a normal speed. The other version is just all the vocabulary pronounced once at normal speed. For each version, I’m going to try to have different voices so that you can have a variety on the voices that you hear pronouncing the vocabulary.

In the podcast, I will be mostly sharing vocabulary lessons in Spanish at first. That is my primary goal, but I will be sharing lessons in other languages as well as time permits. I personally love learning vocabulary in other languages as well. Learning vocabulary builds your foundation and enables you to learn a language. I enjoy learning vocabulary, and I also use these lessons to train other teachers on how to teach a languages. So, you will primarily find lessons in Spanish and from time to time, lessons in other languages. One of the most important parts of learning a language is to learn vocabulary, and I want help you learn vocabulary in this podcast.

We know from the research, studies, and the literature from the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), as well as experts in SLA, professors with a PhD in SLA, that learning vocabulary and getting comprehensible input are essential for someone to speak a language and develop fluency. Comprehensible input means listening to communication, language, conversations or messages that you can understand as well as reading materials that you can read and comprehend. In my other podcasts, I focus on giving you comprehensible input, but in this podcast, I want to help you build your vocabulary. This podcast serves as the foundation for my other podcasts so that you can learn vocabulary here, and you can hear it in context on my other podcasts so that you can get comprehensible input.

Learning vocabulary is central for you to speak a language, and it is the easiest part of a language to learn because you can get concrete mental representations in mind with a word or phrase, and you can expand from that. For example, if I say the word “dog,” you can immediately think of the animal, you can picture the pet. If I say “cauliflower,” you can picture the vegetable in your mind. If I say “angry,” you might get an image in your mind of a person who is angry. These words are called “content words.” Content words include, for example: nouns, verb, adjectives and adverbs; they can evoke concrete images in your mind and, because of that, you can create stronger connections in your mind between a word and what it represents.

We also have function words which are more difficult to manipulate and represent in your mind. For example, if I say to you the preposition “with,” you cannot really think of anything. You might be asking yourself, “with what?” With doesn’t mean anything. “With” by itself doesn’t bring a picture in your mind. If I say to you, “the, t-h-e,” even though it is the number 1 most common word in English, “the” by itself, doesn’t mean anything. So, these function words or connecting words are more difficult to learn because they don’t have a clear mental representation. What the research tells us is that we usually learn these function words as part of phrases or language chunks and once we have encountered them many times during our conversations or the input that we get, they become well represented in our mind, and then we are able deconstruct and construct language subconsciously and more quickly.

If you know vocabulary, even if you don’t know how to use grammar correctly, you will be able to communicate, express your message, and receive feedback that can help you polish your sentence and grammar. For instance, Professor Joe Barcroft at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, who is a scholar and expert in vocabulary learning; he express it very nicely in his article Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition: A Lexical Input Processing Approach. In this article, professor Barcroft gives an example where he compares hearing two very short phrases: the first is “it snow” just like that “it snow,” without the -s at the end, and the second phrase is “it nevs.” Now, I’ll quote what he says about this: “The grammar error in the first sentence does not impede transmission of the intended meaning to the extent that the vocabulary error in the second sentence does. In fact, the vocabulary error in the second sentence renders the sentence basically incomprehensible.”

So, suppose you hear “it snow.” If you hear that and if you speak English, you can understand that even though grammatically, it is not correct.  Depending on the context, the learner might have meant “it snows” or “it is snowing,” but you can understand this sentence and you can understand the meaning of what the person is trying to say, and you can even offer the correction to the person talking to you. So, in a way, the learner just got a grammar lesson for free just for trying.

Nonetheless, if a learner doesn’t know the word and relies on his or her first language to try to come up with a word and that person says, “it nevs” or “it is neving” which is grammatically correct for both the simple present or present continuous in English, as someone who speaks English and doesn’t speak Italian or Spanish, this phrase will be incomprehensible; someone who speaks English but does not speak Italian or Spanish, will probably not understand this sentence.

For this reason, learning vocabulary not only gives you more opportunities to communicate and express yourself, but it can also provide you with an opportunity to get feedback from a native speaker and learn how to express your sentence correctly. Otherwise, if you don’t know the word or you use your first language, you might not be able to communicate at all and lose that opportunity to learn when you are talking to someone who is a native speaker of the language that you’re speaking.

One thing that I would say about learning vocabulary is that most experts in Second Language Acquisition would discourage you from learning vocabulary by learning vocabulary lists or simply using flashcards. In fact, there is research that indicates that learning vocabulary by learning its translation first, and then connecting that to an image that you can have in your mind, for example connecting that to a picture, creates a weaker connection in your mind than if you just learn the word by connecting it directly with the picture, directly with what it represents in your mind. Looking at a word and then a picture of what it represents would create a stronger mental representation in your mind, and your connection between the word and this image may be stronger and last longer in your mind. 

In this podcast, you will hear vocabulary words, and you’ll have a supporting webpage with the words and pictures. The idea is that, at least the first time you listen to the episode, that you can hear the words, look at the words and look the pictures so that you can make that direct connection between them, that direct connection between the word and what it represents. At the end of the vocabulary lesson on the webpage, you can also see the words and their definitions in English. Don’t study that. That is there as a reference in case you are not sure what the picture represents. Don’t use that to make flashcards either. Don’t study the vocabulary by making flashcards. That will slow down you process to learn vocabulary words.

The best way to learn vocabulary is to simply play the episode, open the supplemental webpage, and follow along the pronunciation and the pictures. The idea is to give you a short and simple lesson that you can do whenever you have three to five minutes to spare here and there. We all have these three minutes here and there when we are waiting or when are doing something where we are no occupying our mind and that is a great time for you to be able to practice the vocabulary. As time permits, I am also going to create exercises for you to practice, and I’ll be able to include that on the webpages where you can find the pictures and the words from the vocabulary lessons.

Vocabulary learning is a fascinating area of study within the field of Second Language Acquisition. If you are a language teacher and you want to know more about how we learn vocabulary and how it develops in our mind, I suggest three books by two top experts in vocabulary learning, two top researchers and scholars in Second Language Acquisition. One is How Vocabulary is Learned by professor Paul Nation, an emeritus professor from Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, and also Input-Based Incremental Vocabulary Instruction as well as Vocabulary in Language Teaching, both by professor Joe Barcroft from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and for full disclosure, I didn’t get sponsored or paid to recommend these books to you. These are books from my personal library that I think can be very useful to you.

I have read the three books, and they give you great insights as to how to develop vocabulary knowledge in our brain and how you can apply that knowledge to teach vocabulary more effectively; so, for those of you who are teaching a language, I suggest reading those three books to give you perspective on how to teach vocabulary.

Finally, to share a little bit about myself, I am Joel Zárate, and I am the podcast host and creator. I was born in Mexico, but I moved to California after finishing High School, many, many years ago. I hold a bachelor’s degree in Spanish, and I have two master’s degrees: a master’s degree in Spanish and a master’s degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from the California State University, Sonoma campus. In both graduate degrees, I directed my studies to Second Language Acquisition and have taught English and Spanish to many students. I speak Spanish, English, French, Italian and Portuguese, and I am learning how to say a few things in other languages like Japanese, German, Chinese, Russian and Other Languages. I love learning languages and love teaching languages, and I hope that with this podcast, I can contribute to your journey to learn vocabulary in Spanish and together learn vocabulary in other languages.

If you want to know more about me and my other podcasts, you can find the link to my website and other podcasts on the show notes.

Thank you for listening to the first episode of the Vocabulary in Spanish & Other Languages podcast, and I’ll see you on the next vocabulary lesson. Thank you so much everybody and hasta pronto, adiós.