Studies on foreign language acquisition indicate that the human way of appropriating the lexicon is similar to that of the mother tongue, although it has its characteristics. In the framework of phraseology, the phraseological units in Spanish present a clear difference in the semantic interface compared to that of the corresponding ones in Russian. To carry out this study, 20 Russian university students with a linguistic profile who learn Spanish as L2 are selected to analyze how they acquire the phraseological units in context. Likewise, conceptual maps are proposed as a type of cognitive activity for teaching phraseology in ELE, specifically somatic verbal locutions to facilitate the phraseological acquisition process, as well as its memorization.