As promised in my first post, I am going to outline some simple Cognate Patterns that will help to boost your vocabulary almost instantly.
Cognates are words in two languages with similar meanings, spelling, and pronunciation. They can be an excellent tool for language learners because they allow for a quick and easy understanding of new vocabulary In Spanish, there are more than 15,000 cognates related to English words!
When I started on my Spanish learning journey, I found the number of new words I needed to try to learn to be a bit overwhelming. Discovering Cognate Patterns (like the one I'm going to look at below) has definitely helped me to build confidence in my communication in Spanish. These cognates mean that I'm stuck for the right word, I simply use one that I already know.
Our first Cognate Pattern will be Spanish words ending in "-ación."
The majority of these words are almost identical to English words ending in "-tion."
This Cognate Pattern is incredibly useful for Spanish learners as it unlocks over 1,250 words.
For example, the word "situation" in English is almost identical to "situación" in Spanish. If a Spanish speaker says "la situación," an English speaker can easily translate this as "the situation." Similarly, "communication" becomes "comunicación," and "information" becomes "información," and so on.
You are probably already aware that Spanish nouns have a gender (the most common are masculine and feminine, though some Spanish pronouns are considered to have neutral gender), and that it is essential to use the correct article in front of them.
Well, this is another great thing about this Cognate Pattern: words ending in "-ción" are almost always feminine. This means that they will be preceded by "la" instead of "el" or "una" instead of "un." This knowledge can help Spanish learners from getting tongue-tied while trying to identify the correct article to use when constructing sentences.
A quick trick to turn nouns into verbs:
Another helpful trick is that some of these nouns can be converted into “ar” verbs by removing the "-ción" and adding an "r" to the end.
For example, "comunicar" means "to communicate."
This verb conversion trick can be a helpful tool for learners who want to be able to communicate or "comunicar" (see what I did there?) more effectively.
Here are a few simple Spanish sentences using this Cognate Pattern:
La comunicación con mis colegas es esencial. (Communication with my colleagues is essential)
La conversación con mi amigo fue muy interesante. (The conversation with my friend was very interesting.)
La presentación del producto fue muy profesional. (The presentation of the product was very professional.)
Even if you don’t know every word in these sentences, you were probably able to guess the meaning based on the cognates in these sentences.
In future posts, I am going to explore the other Cognate Patterns that can help you to confidently expand your Spanish vocabulary using words that are already familiar from English.
¡Hasta pronto, amigos!
I loved this — made me realiseI already knew quite a lot of Spanish!
also great to learn English ;)