You might not realise it, but you already know hundreds or even thousands of Spanish words. In these articles, we'll show you how English and Spanish share hundreds of words that you can use every day.
In the last article, we looked at words with the same spelling and meaning in both languages. In this article, we'll look at words with slightly different spellings that are still close enough to be easily understood and used.
In Spanish, there is no "TH."
There are a lot of English words that look like Spanish words but are just a little bit different. This is because you don't see T and H together very often in Spanish. When you add a H to a Spanish word that looks strange, it may make more sense. Cathedral comes from catedral, thesis from tesis, marathon from maraton, thermal from termal, and autor means author. I bet you can guess what matematico is.
The th sound is changed to a flat t sound, like in the word "hat."
In Spanish, there is no "TION."
In Spanish, there are no words that end in TH, and there are also no words that end in TION. This means that instead of edition, we have edicion, where the T is replaced by a C. When we know this, it's easy to figure out what words like "attention," "association," "collection," "addition," and "combinacion" mean.
Some of the spellings are different, but only in small ways. If you know what to look for, you'll be able to tell which words are which.
The spelling and the way a word sounds change. For example, the sh sound in the word edition changes to a thee sound in the word edicion.
Adding A Vowel.
Many Spanish words are the same as their English counterparts except for one letter. Usually, that letter is a vowel at the end of the word. This is because, like many other languages, Spanish gives many of its words a gender. If the gender is male, the word ends in an O, and if it is female, the word ends in an A.
A Spanish word like "apartamento" means "apartment," but because it has a "-o" at the end, it sounds more like "apartment." Other words that sound like producto are busto, which means "bust" in sculpture, bulbo, cataclismo, concepto, candidato, and producto (product).
This means that words that end in A, like acrobata, candidata (female candidate), diagrama, epica, ilusionista (illusionist), and planeta, now have the feminine ending (planet).
As you can see above, Spanish words like "candidate" can end with either an O or an A, depending on who is being talked about, but that shouldn't stop you from understanding what the word means.
Spanish is a well-defined language, which means that the rules for how to use it are easy to understand. However, no language rule is infallible, but after reading these articles, you should have a bigger Spanish vocabulary.
