[Course Forum] First 5000 Words of Spanish: Top Up #1 by ian_mn

This is the discussion forum for the course First 5000 Words of Spanish: Top Up #1

Top Up courses #1 through #4 cover general purpose, high-frequency vocabulary that’s not already included in First 5000 Words of Spanish by xoviat (or the reformatted version - Introductory Spanish 1 etc by BenWhately).

While constructing this course, I referred to the following sources:

  • GCSE Spanish AQA Vocabulary List (2009 edition)
  • 2001 Most Useful Spanish Words by García Loaeza
  • Spanish Top 5000 Vocabulary by Anki
  • U.S. Border Patrol Basic Vocabulary List
  • AWL headwords & most-frequent sublist words

FULL AUDIO (mostly added by @iliassintino)

1 Like

@RancidBeef

Just to let you know, I followed up on your suggestion from a few months ago, and I’ve added “Phrase” to the Part of Speech label for all the compound forms in my Top Up courses.

I think this significantly improves these courses - and thanks for the suggestion.

2 Likes

Great! Thanks! I appreciate all the hard work you put into creating and maintaining your courses.

Hey Ian,

I noticed that one of the prompts in LV.1 says “en turno a” where I believe “en torno a” was intended.

Thanks,

Daniel

Hi Daniel, thanks for looking at this one.

This could actually be O.K., but I’ll do some research during the weekend. I just did some quick checks and I’m seeing the same translation (word #2252) in Davies’ 5000 frequency dictionary, so I’m not sure right now.
http://www.mfnco.com/e-library/books/A%20Frequency%20Dictionary%20of%20Spanish.pdf

Ian.

Hi @Danielpresto

I believe that you’re right, and I’ve therefore just deleted the item “en turno a” from this Top Up #1 course. Meanwhile, the item “en torno a” is already included in my Top Up #3 course (Level 7), and looks fine.

I looked up several dictionaries (including three online dictionaries) and the phrase “en turno a” was included nowhere.

I got this item from the Anki course Spanish Top 5000 Vocabulary about three years ago, and I suspect that their original source for this particular item was the Davies Frequency Dictionary. As a cross-check, I looked for the phrase “en turno a” in Davies’ most frequent 50,000 3-grams* (three-word permutations) and it’s not there. The bottom line is that the phase is either very rare or includes a simple typo. Either way, it made sense to remove it from this course.

Thanks for flagging this up.
Ian.

Hello @ian_mn,

Level 4
la batería
battery; gun deck

Could you add “Drum kit” as well?

Yes - an excellent suggestion, I think. The item is now:

la batería = battery; drum kit; gun deck

1 Like

resuelto = resolute, resolved, determined

Could you add “not decidido” to the English description?

Hi, thanks for looking at this one.

I think I used definitions from SpanDict and the Davies “Frequency Dictionary of Spanish”.

I’m inclined to leave this one as it is right now, as I think we’ve got a reasonably good cognate (resolute) as the first definition. So I’m thinking that disambiguation is probably unnecessary here.

For the item !Felicitaciones! the first exclamation mark should be corrected to be upside down. Thanks!

1 Like

la llanta = tyre, tire (not “el neumático”)

According to wikipedia, llanta translates to rim, and tire translates to neumático or cubierta
…but in some central american countries the tire is also called llanta.

So I would add rim as primary translation to this item.

Hi, thanks for looking at this one.

I took a quick look at some online definitions of “llanta”, and tire (=tyre) seems consistently to be the primary definition. So, I’m inclined to leave this one as it stands right now.

Anyone have any thoughts on if there are too many contradictions for this to be useful for someone focusing on South American Spanish?

Thanks!

I’m not sure what you mean by contradictions.

The first four Top Up courses cover general purpose Spanish vocabulary that is not included in the 5000 word courses by xoviat or BenWhatley.

Some items are marked Sp., Lat Am, Mex, etc. - so you could use the Memrise ignore function to discard items that mainly apply to the particular regions you’re not interested in.

Hi @ian_mn! Thanks for the reply … I meant contradictions between translation of Spanish from Spain and Spanish from South America (specifically Mexico).

Do you think the contradictions are small enough that they don’t matter?

Thanks for the reply!

Hi William,

I think that the vocabulary in the 5000 courses and Top Up courses will almost always be relevant to all Spanish speaking countries. So I think you would be safe to go ahead with these courses.

Another good option (that I’m guessing you’ve already looked at) - that obviously focuses on Mexican Spanish - would be to work through some of the Mexican Spanish courses created by the Memrise staff: https://www.memrise.com/courses/english/spanish-mexico/

I recommend marking minusválido as offensive, pejorative or insulting.
Thanks!

Hi,

I’m not sure about this. I looked up several online dictionaries, and the only one that indicates that minusválido is “potentially offensive” is this one:
*minusválido - Diccionario Inglés-Español WordReference.com

When making the course, I got the item from the American book “2001 Most Useful Spanish words” by Garcia (2010), p117.

To investigate a little, I just did a search for “Disabled Parking” on Linguee, and several of the example phrases use “minusválido”:
*disabled parking - Spanish translation – Linguee
and followed up by looking at the website that contains one of the example phrases:
*http://www.campingsavinan.com/es/tarifas
which does contain the term “Parking minusválidos”.

So I’m not sure what to do here. I don’t want to delete a potentially useful item unnecessarily.

Here’s a reference I found: