Nov. 21st, 2017

livingdeb: (Default)
I started listening to the Spanish lessons in Language Transfer. This program is sort of like the book Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish because it shows similarities between Spanish and English. And it's sort of like the online course Coffee Break Spanish because you listen to a student and teacher and get to try giving the answers before the other student does. I kind of love it. (They also have other languages, if you're interested.)

A fascinating strategy the instructor recommends for trying to guess a verb in Spanish is to first think whether there is a related -tion noun in English. If so, you can probably guess a Spanish verb by a) converting the English noun to a Spanish noun, then b) changing the -ción to -r.

For example:

Verb you want: create
Related -tion noun: creation
Spanish noun: creación
Spanish verb: crear

Here's a slightly tricky example:

Verb you want: illustrate
Related -tion noun: illustration
Spanish noun: ilustración (no double-l in Spanish for an l sound)
Spanish verb: ilustrar

Here's a less obvious example:

Verb you want: carry on
Related -tion noun: continuation
Spanish noun: continuación
Spanish verb: continuar

Here's a less perfect example:

Verb you want: demonstrate
Related -tion noun: demonstration
Spanish noun: demostración (only one "n")
Spanish verb: demostrar

Apparently, the bulk of English -tion words come from Latin, as do the bulk of all Spanish words. So that's why this works.

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