One thing that worked for me with Spanish was to look for English words that sounded like the Spanish word. I would then link the image of the "sounds like" to the image of the Spanish meaning.
For instance, the Spanish word for wrist is muneca. I heard the "Moo" in muneca and thought cow. I imagined a tiny cow on my wrist. To this day (20 years later), I still remember what muneca means. I should have applied that to all the words, but I got lazy. It's more work upfront but it makes links that are hard to erase.