Intense Spanish for Mastery

# Guiding Thoughts The goal here is real Spanish fluency. One part of that is to gain a broad Spanish vocabulary covering many different topics. Another part is to learn to build correct grammatical phrases quickly and effortlessly. We make no plan to *teach* any subject here. The cards are for practice. Some things just have to be learned by rote. ## Who Can Use These Cards Everyone can use this course, but we make no attempt to include a beginner deck for students who need to learn the most basic and most common words of the language. ## Passive and Active Vocabulary Building our vocabulary will include building both our passive vocabulary and active vocabulary, but those will not advance at the same rate. You may be able to recognize thousands of words but only be able to actively use a few hundred of them. That is OK. You don't have to add every word to your active vocabulary. For that reason, the flash cards are not intended to be used either front to back or back to front. They have a specific direction. Studying to recognize the meaning of a word is different from studying to actively use a word. Some decks will focus on gaining passive mastery of many words and others will focus on gaining active mastery so you can use the word in conversation or writing. Over this course, we hope to add about 5000 thousand words to our passive Spanish vocabulary. I have not written all of the cards for that yet. They are in progress. Of those, we will aim to master perhaps 2000 or so in the active vocabulary. ### Organization into Subjects In most cases, vocabulary will not be organized into decks based on subject or based on how common the words are. You may identify some themes among the words in a given deck, but mostly they will just be random assortments of unrelated words---much like how people encounter words organically in everyday life. ### Lord of the Rings Vocab The Lord of the Rings novels are available in Spanish translation. They are not easy reading. The author was a professor of linguistics, writing in English, and his books offer a challenge even to a native English speaker reading in the original English. The Lord of the Rings vocabulary contains a lot of words related to land formations and descriptions of the outside world. But also I included just any word I did not already know while reading these books. As of this writing, I'm still reading, by the way. There are many, many challenging new words in Lord of the Rings. I don't think it is necessary to add all of these words to one's active vocabulary. So here the focus is on recognition---passive vocabulary. I chose to read this novel in Spanish mainly because it isn't boring. I wanted to read a real novel, an entertaining novel, in Spanish. But also it is a challenging mountain of vocabulary to climb. ### ''Very Common'' Vocab Decks These decks of very common vocabulary are created from a frequency list of Spanish words. The goal here is mainly just to recognize these words---that is, to build the passive vocabulary. These also include various forms of conjugated verbs, and the goal is just to recognize the base meaning of the verb. The card will not ask you to understand the person, tense, and mood of the conjugated verb. Other desk will focus on the specifics of verb conjugation. ## Grammar Some decks will focus on grammatical constructions. For example, I intend to write a deck that focuses on conjugations of common irregular verbs in various tenses and moods. This will require both active and passive mastery. One needs to be able to actively conjugate ser and estar in all tenses and moods, for example. ##Instructions There is no particular order to the decks. You don't need to do them in order, and you don't need to finish one before starting the next one. They do not build upon one another. They all build upon Spanish.