Spanish words you already know: three rules that turn English into Spanish

As a native speaker of English you already own several hundred Spanish words. The reason is history: after 1066 English took a huge layer of vocabulary from Norman French, and later more straight from Latin, while Spanish grew out of Latin directly. So the long, formal half of your vocabulary (information, university, curious) is plain everyday Spanish. A word that sounds formal in English, like "necessary" or "difficult", is simply the normal word in Spanish: necesario, difícil.

Better still, these words come over by rules, not as a list. Learn three endings and you will recognise words you have never seen before.

Rule 1: -tion → -ción

The biggest one. English -tion becomes -ción, and the noun is always feminine, with la:

Three things to notice. Double letters mostly disappear: attention → atención, communication → comunicación (but cc stays where you hear two sounds: action → acción). A word can't start with s + consonant, so it gets an e: station → estación, like student → estudiante. And the mark on ó means the stress always falls on the ending: in-for-ma-CIÓN. In the plural the mark goes, because the stress no longer needs it: las naciones.

The same bridge works for -sion → -sión: television → la televisión, decision → la decisión, mission → la misión, again with one s and again feminine.

Rule 2: -ty → -dad

English -ty becomes -dad. Less obvious to the eye, completely regular, and again always la:

A few take -tad instead: liberty → la libertad, difficulty → la dificultad. The stress sits on the last syllable, and the final d is soft, close to the th in "this", often barely heard.

Rule 3: -ous → -oso / -osa

Adjectives in -ous become -oso, and like every Spanish adjective they agree with the noun: un libro famoso "a book famous", una actriz famosa "an actress famous" (= a famous actress). How agreement works is in adjectives and agreement.

This rule has more exceptions than the other two: obvious → obvio, enormous → enorme, ridiculous → ridículo. If -oso sounds odd, check.

Five shorter bridges

Watch the small changes: possible → posible with one s, responsible → responsable with an a. Spelling also gets simpler on the way: ph → f (photo → la foto), th → t (theatre → el teatro). In the -ico group the stress falls on the third syllable from the end, and Spanish marks it every time: la música, romántico. The -mente adverbs are built on the feminine form of the adjective, so it is rápidamente, not rápidomente: adverbs in «-mente».

Gender comes free

The rules hand you more than the word. -ción, -sión and -dad are always feminine: la. -mento is masculine: el momento, el documento. For an English speaker, who has never had to think about gender, this is a real gift: the ending tells you the article, no dictionary needed. The rest of the system is in articles, gender and number.

Say them the Spanish way

Recognising a word on the page and saying it are different skills, and cognates are where an English accent leaks in most. English squeezes unstressed syllables into a quick "uh": "personality" comes out "per-suh-NAL-uh-tee". Spanish gives every syllable a full vowel and roughly equal time: per-so-na-li-dad. The stress often moves too: EDucation, but e-du-ca-CIÓN.

One regional note: the c in -ción sounds like the th in "think" in most of Spain and like s in Latin America and the Canaries. Both are correct; pick one and stay with it.

So say every word you recognise out loud, at least once. Otherwise what sticks is the English word written in Spanish letters.

Not every lookalike is a friend

A small set of words look familiar and mean something else: realizar is "to carry out", not "to realize" (that is darse cuenta); la librería is a bookshop, not a library (la biblioteca); embarazada is "pregnant". They are few next to the hundreds of honest words, but they are worth knowing on sight: Spanish false friends for English speakers.

What to do with it

Recognising la información in a text is not the same as finding it in time in a conversation. The course turns the words you recognise into phrases you say out loud from the first chapters: in A1 you ask for la estación and la información on the way through the city (the A1 page).

To find out which chapter is yours, take the level test: ten minutes, free.