How I Learned Spanish: Using a Monolingual Dictionary

Screenshot from the Author’s Phone

Whether we like it or not, as non-native speakers of a language we need dictionaries to learn the language. Unlike a native speaker who can rely on repeated exposure of language use in context to learn the subtleties of a word or idiom, you and I, the language enthusiast, have to rely on looking up definitions.

There are a few problems that I encountered using dictionaries when I reached the intermediate phase of my Spanish study. As I discuss in my book The Tower of Babbling, during this phase, the amount of new and difficult vocabulary becomes almost overwhelming and it often felt like I was studying my Spanish-English dictionary app more than I was actually studying Spanish.

Here are a few of the problems that I personally encountered:

• Continuously being pulled away from the language by reading definitions in my native language (English)
• Focusing too much on memorizing the written definition of the word, instead of learning how it should be used contextually
• Spending more time with the dictionary than the text that I was trying to read or the content that I was trying to learn from (i.e. falling down the rabbit hole of synonyms, idioms, antonyms, and related terminology)
• Doubling the time of my language study to account for…