Why is vocabulary so important for advanced Spanish?

Expanding your Spanish vocabulary is key when you want to improve your overall skills or prepare for an advanced exam such as DELE C1. Indeed, in order to pass this kind of exam, you must understand the nuances and perceive differences in Spanish words.

Achieving this will help you make sure you understand correctly the texts you read and the documents you hear. It will also make your language richer, more precise and more articulate when it’s your time to speak or write.

That’s why having a broad vocabulary can be help you complete reading, writing, speaking and listening tasks with ease.

So, how can you proceed? How do you find new vocabulary to memorize? Where do you look for it? What’s the best way to memorize it? What topics should you cover?

In this post, we will answer this questions and look at some of the best ways to broaden your Spanish vocabulary: word families, collocations, synonyms and semantic fields.

Word families

The first way to make sure your vocabulary is coherent is by creating word families. These word  families are created by adding different prefixes and suffixes to a base noun. This will not only help you learn new words but also notice the patterns inherent to the Spanish language:

Collocations

Another interesting way to practice new vocabulary is by forming collocations with usual verbs. Collocations are pairs of words which automatically come to our mind when we think about a specific verb or noun. For example, let’s take a look at the verb tomar, exemplified below:

As you see, there are plenty of nouns with an article (el sol, un café, el pelo, una decisión) and without an article (parte, nota, conciencia, medidas) that are always associated with the verb “tomar”.

Not only will this technique help you improve your fluency, it will also make you sound more natural and idiomatic.

Could you create similar ones with generic verbs such as “dar”, “echar” or “poner”? What about more specific verbs such as  “cometer”, “plantear” or “adoptar”?

Synonyms

One of the best ways to broaden the vocabulary is including as many synonyms as possible to a specific word we often use. For example, with “interesante”:

Could you create similar ones for the verbs pensar or decir, for example? You will notice we tend to stick to the same nouns over and over again, so try mixing things up next time you have to talk about a daily topic and include at least 3 variations of the same word in each conversation.

Semantic fields

Another great way to learn new vocabulary is to work with semantic fields. These fields work particularly well with sectors that interest us personally or that often appear in the news.

The best way to practice with semantic fields is by elaborating mind maps with tools such as Goconqr.

A useful textbook

If you want to find more exercises of this type, check out Uso interactivo del vocabulario, a great practice book that will help you improve your vocabulary quickly and efficiently.

I hope this post was useful to find more Spanish vocabulary for DELE C1, don’t forget to check out our exam preparation courses and our DELE C1 tutorial.

I hope to see you soon for more Spanish practice. Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Instagram 🙂