Learn Spanish with Images Part I

One of the benefits of choosing to learn Spanish, or any other Latin based tongue, is that you can expect to pick up a lot of words very quickly just be using some simple rules.
For example, if in English it ends in ‘tion’ then just change it to ‘ción’ and you will almost always be right. ‘Vacación’, ‘celebración’, ‘locomoción’ and ‘modificación’ all work perfectly well. I remember the look of surprise on a friend’s face – back in the days when my dictionary was both my best friend and my worst enemy and when even a simple sentence was a five minute struggle– when he tried to explain the concept of water being directed to the surrounding fields and I confidently stated, ‘ahh, irrigación’.
Apart from this simple rule you can also try the old classic tactic of adding an ‘a’ onto an English word if you are referring to something feminine, or an ‘o’ if it is masculine. This works less well then you might imagine, but occasionally you stumble on the right word. If this fails the last resort is to just try and say the English word in a Spanish accent. Sometimes it works you know.
However, if you really want to learn Spanish to a decent level then you will come across a few words which bear no resemblance to any equivalent words in English and which are hard to memorise. To cope with these I came up with my own system to learn Spanish words using visual mnemonics.