volver a preguntar

In short

• ▶
  volver a preguntar

  to ask again

Why it looks that way

Volver a plus an infinitive is 'to do again' — Spanish's substitute for a prefix. Volver a leer — reread; volver a llamar — call back

A word with a story stays in memory longer than one learned as a “spelling — translation” pair: memory holds on to meaning, not to a string.

In a live sentence

A single word almost never appears alone in conversation. A sentence shows where it fits and what stands next to it.

• ▶
  No me ha quedado claro, voy a volver a preguntar

  It's no clearer to me, I'll ask again

How not to forget this word

Reading a word and remembering it are different jobs. A day later, little survives of a single reading — and that is not bad memory, that is how memory works.

• This has been tested on foreign words too. The difference shows up most when you test yourself a few days later rather than straight away.checked many times
  Kim & Webb, 2022, Language Learning 72(2) · 48 experiments, 3,411 participants, 98 comparisons.
• Recalling beats re-reading. Covering the translation and trying to remember it does more than reading it ten more times.checked many times
  Adesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017, Review of Educational Research 87(3) · 188 experiments, 272 comparisons. g = 0.61; against plain re-reading 0.51, against passive review 0.93.
• An answer you worked out yourself sticks better than one handed to you.checked many times
  Bertsch et al., 2007, Memory & Cognition 35(2) · 86 studies, 445 comparisons, d = 0.40.

Next

• ¿cómo dice? — what did you say?phrase
• no le he oído bien — I didn't catch thatphrase
• ¿cómo se escribe? — how is it spelled?phrase
• ¿cómo se llama esto? — what is this called?phrase
• All Spanish wordsIndex by topic