Anki deck: first Spanish words with sound-alike mnemonics
This is a ready-made Anki deck with first words of Spanish, the ones you need on a trip and in your first lessons: food, the city, family, time, shopping. The front of each card shows the word and an easy pronunciation guide; the back has the translation, an English sound-alike, a short scene that ties the sound to the meaning, and an example.
The words and associations come from the shared base of the Palabra app. Not everything made it in: only associations whose keyword is made of real English words, not a respelling of the foreign word, and only cards that passed proofreading, where the translation, sound-alike, scene and example were checked one by one. Words that do not have a good association yet were left out.
Spanish: 172 starter words by topic
Topics: meeting people (5), Body (6), In the city (10), Home & things (11), Food (13), Transport (12), Family & people (11), Time & weather (15), shopping (8), Clothes (8), Nature & animals (9), Everyday verbs (17), at a café (8), Work & professions (6), Hobbies & free time (7), My day (10), at the doctor (7), travel & hotel (9).
Word
Meaning
Sound-alike and scene
por favor pohr fah-BOHR
please
poor flavor. A poor chef begs politely for better flavor, holding an empty spoon and bowing his head humbly.
plaza PLAH-sah
square
plaza. The same word: plaza — the town square.
silla SEE-yah
chair
see ya. “See ya!” yells the chair, rolling out the door on its four wooden legs.
carne KAHR-neh
meat
carnival. At the carnival a giant steak dances samba; the meat shakes to the drums.
bicicleta bee-see-KLEH-tah
bicycle
bicycle. Nearly the same: bicicleta — a bicycle with castanets in the spokes.
On a computer, open Anki and choose File → Import; on a phone, just open the file in AnkiMobile or AnkiDroid.
The deck appears in your list under its own name. Cards are tagged by topic, so you can study one topic at a time.
How to study with these cards
Read the word aloud and try to recall the meaning first. If it does not come, flip the card, picture the scene and say the word again. The sound-alike is only needed at the start: once the meaning comes by itself, without the scene, the hint has done its job.
Ten new cards a day is enough: the reviews Anki schedules for the following days add up quickly, and a bigger daily quota turns into a backlog within a week.
Terms
The decks are free. Use them yourself and in class, and share the link to this page. If you spot a mistake in a card, tell us through the form on the support page and it will be fixed in the next version of the file. Support.
License: CC BY-NC 4.0 — you may copy, share and adapt the decks for non-commercial purposes with attribution (Palabra Lexi and a link to this page). The word lists, translations, sound-alikes, scenes and examples are our own; the files contain text only, no audio or images.
The same words by topic can be browsed without Anki: words by topic.