New vocabulary topics

A few new vocabulary topics have been added to the Spanish phrases section:

• School and education in Spanish
• Movies and cinema in Spanish
• Playing cards and games in Spanish

Some corresponding crossword games have also been added.

Suggestions for new topics are always welcome and can be left as a comment to this blog or on the site's feedback section.

Common Spanish verb forms

If you're learning to read Spanish, you may find this new list of common Spanish verb forms useful. The idea is that buy learning these frequently-occurring forms, readers will find it easier to acquire new vocabulary from written Spanish before mastering the conjugation of verbs and tense forms generally.

The list was produced from a computer analysis of a corpus of around 2,000 contemporary newspaper and magazine articles. The list therefore reflects common verb forms found in this genre and writing style (for instance, third-person forms predominate, and there are a variety of verbs to do with "utterances", but fewer to do with "actions").

For convenience, the list has been split up into various semantic/syntactic categories (auxiliaries, action verbs etc). Note that the criteria for assigning the verbs to these different categories is rather ad-hoc and does not conform strictly to any particular semantic or syntactic theory.

New wordsearch and crossword games

Some new crossword and wordsearch themes have been added.
Visitors are invited to leave comments on this entry suggesting further topics.