For all those trying to learn Spanish, whether in the beginning stages of in the grips of fluency; there are always little tricks of the trade, tips that can help you remember or learn in a manner more effective than the traditional ways.

I want to bring to light these things called cognates, using the patterns that these cognates provide will instantly give your Spanish vocabulary a huge boost, and with minimal effort to boot, not bad huh?

A cognate is a word that exists in two or more languages, maybe with slightly different spelling, but each with the etymon, that is, the same origin. What’s so great about the relationship between Spanish and English is that they are in a way ‘cousins,’ both sharing a common ancestor in Indo-European.

Let’s get to the meat of this, to the point, to the heart of the subject.

Because so many words have the same etymon, the spellings often require little change, and the pattern remains the same all throughout. Take for example, the Spanish word nación, can you guess what that is in English? It’s nation. Alright how about the word publicación? Easy right? It’s publication. So the pattern is that English words ending in -tion can be translated to Spanish by changing the -tion to -ción, simple.

The same pattern can be applied to English words ending in -ty, they change to Spanish by replacing that with -dad or -tad. Liberty becomes libertad, authority becomes autoridad, and so on. Many words that end in -ly change to -mente in Spanish, such as rapidly and it’s counterpart rápidamente, prudently and prudentemente. Occupations that end in -ist, such as dentist and artist change to -ista, therefore dentista and artista. Fields such as geology and ecology change the -y for an -ía, becoming geología and ecología. Often words that end in -ous become words that end in -oso, famous to famoso, precious to precioso. Words ending in -cy move onto -cia, redundancy to redundancia. The last one I will touch on is -ism, words ending in this, such as capitalism and communism, change to a -ismo suffix, therefore becoming capitalismo and comunismo. There are more, but this will do for today.

Now that we have that out of the way, tell me if you can understand this:

“el artista es considerablemente democrática” — Translated that’s: The artist is considerably democratic.

How about:

“el director absurdo es una distracción” — That’s  the absurd director is a distraction.

How did you do? It is very important to note that these are not fixed rules, there are exceptions commonly known as false friends, so it pays to look into it a little before hand to avoid any embarrassing situations.

Did you understand the sentences? Can you make some yourself using these cognates?