This is another new feature that we hope to run once a week here at Notes in Spanish. And we’d love your help! If you have a great tip for learning spanish, send us details via an email and we’ll publish it here (send us a photo along with your idea and we’ll publish that too, so everyone knows who had the great idea!)

To get started, we have two top tips this week:

1. Use a new word 6 times!

A linguistics expert once told us that in order to commit a new word to memory we have to use it 6 times. So, next time you hear a great new Spanish word and want to commit it to memory, find 6 ways to use it as soon as possible – speaking in class, thinking random sentences, writing a post using the word in the Spanish part of our forum… it really does work!

2. Speaking of the forums… The ‘El Pais’ test.

The number of tips you can pick up in the Learnin Spanish section of the forum is incredible. Here’s one of our favourites, from Steve W.:

When I’m learning anything I like lots and lots of examples, and sometimes the textbooks are a bit sparse. When I’ve learned a new word or especially a phrase, I type it into google and follow it with site:elpais.es (or another grammatically correct site).

e.g. “al menos de” site:elpais.es

…this will return a list of articles using that phrase, from the El Pais website. Pick one and search for the phrase on the page and there is your example. Guaranteed to be used correctly.

Thanks Steve! Don’t forget to send us any top tips, and if you haven’t yet, why not register in the forum and join us for a chat?