When it comes to travel, education, business situations and personal communication, common words rule the day.
Nearly any Spanish conversation calls for an understanding of basic vocabulary.
In your day-to-day interactions with friends, neighbors and co-workers, chances are that you’re using basic nouns, verbs, interrogative words and conversational phrases.
Let’s go over this list of over 210 words to start building your Spanish core vocabulary!
Contents
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Most Common Spanish Words
There are certain Spanish words that you will hear pretty much everyday. Here are some of the most common Spanish words.
Common Spanish Greetings and Conversational Phrases
If you want to start a conversation, you need to know how to greet someone properly. Then you’ll need to whip out some phrases that allow for basic communication in any situation. Learn these essentials phrases to speak with friends as well as strangers!
Common Spanish Nouns
Nouns identify people, places or things, and they make up a large percentage of Spanish core vocabulary. They’re some of the most basic words and are used in nearly every sentence—so get to know a few of the most common ones!
Common Spanish Verbs
Verbs describe actions and are essential words when speaking any language. Of course, you’ll need to learn all their conjugations, but when memorizing new verbs it’s always best to learn the infinitive.
Common Spanish Adjectives and Colors
Common Spanish Numbers
Common Spanish Words for People and Animals
Of course you’ll probably need to know some words to describe people and animals, since those are things you’ll also probably encounter every day!
Common Spanish Words Related to Food
Food is a big part of Spanish culture, so here are the essential words for you to order your favorite meal!
Spanish Question Words
Asking questions is an important part of speaking any language. These are the words you need to ask questions in Spanish:
Easy Spanish Words (Spanish-English Cognates!)
Cognates are words that have the same origin or root word. There are hundreds of Spanish and English cognates, but start with learning these as an excellent way to effortlessly increase your vocabulary!
Common Spanish Words for Traveling
More Resources to Learn Spanish Vocabulary
Common Spanish words open doors by facilitating communication. The more common vocabulary you know, the better off you’ll be.
This list is a great spot to start building your foundational vocabulary, but there are tons of great resources out there that can get you learning and practicing even more common Spanish words!
Here are some of the best resources to find more common Spanish vocabulary words to add to your word bank and build your core vocabulary!
1000MostCommonWords
This site contains a comprehensive list of 1,000 useful Spanish words that cover a wide variety of topics.
If your intent is to grow your vocabulary and add common words to your skillset, then this is a super great resource.
FluentU
FluentU is all about learning Spanish through authentic videos that native speakers would watch.
The language learning program takes short Spanish clips from movies, TV shows, news segments and more and adds tools to help you learn the language as it’s actually used.
Each video comes with interactive subtitles that allow you to see information about different vocabulary words (such as the contextual definition and pronunciation information) in real time. There are also review tools built into the app, such as a video-based dictionary, quizzes and personalized flashcards.
SpanishVocabulary.ca
This vocabulary resource provides several lists divided into topics with some of the most common Spanish words.
Whether you’re honing your skills on greetings, body parts, shopping lingo or a number of other subjects, all of the applicable vocabulary is pre-sorted and labeled.
The website’s interface is very simple, so it’s easy to navigate and find vocabulary about whatever you want.
EnglishnSpanish.com
This resource has 1,000 common Spanish words and is more interactive than just a list of vocabulary.
The words and translations are divided into lists of 20 random words alphabetically sorted.
At the end of each list, learners are given the opportunity to take a quiz on what they’ve just learned. Each quiz asks learners to choose the correct translation of a word, so it’s a pretty straightforward, speedy process.
Quizzing yourself is a great method for gauging retention of these common words.
Now that you have over 210 more words in your core Spanish vocabulary, you have a good basis for most conversations.
Keep learning words and building that foundation!
Download:
This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you
can take anywhere.
Click here to get a copy. (Download)
