Category: Uncategorized
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Exceptions (Ripley’s Words)
Spanish has an international organization, the Asociación de Academias, that works for keeping the unity of language and update the dictionary, the grammar, and the spelling rules. Its scholars don´t come out with any changes, they just listen how people speak and make proposals based on that. Nonetheless, there are always words and expressions that…
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Unity (The Spanish Academy)
In 1713 La Real Academia Española de la Lengua, RAE (The Royal Academy of Spanish Language) was founded. The academy was inspired by the French Academy (the king of Spain at that time, Charles V, was French). Since then, RAE has been serving the Spanish speakers to establish a standard. Basically, RAE updates the three…
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Dialects (Madrid, Mexico City & Buenos Aires)
First thing first, what is a dialect? What is the difference between dialect and language? Easy: Can´t you communicate with the other fluently? Then, you both are speaking two languages. If you can communicate fluently, then you speak the same language. So, what is a dialect? it is a way to speak within a language.…
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Essential Words (Function Words)
It may sound too boring to be true, but classifying “words” is important when it comes to learning a language fast. Why classifying is important? Systems can be reduced to the maximum as a set of elements and the rules that operates with those elements. For example, zoologists study animals (a set of elements) and…
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Same Sound (Homophones)
Homophones are those words that have the same sound in one language, like in English “flower” and “flour.” Once you have a certain level of Spanish, knowing the homophones in Spanish with give you confidence. Another reason to know them is that is… fun? It is curious that two words that sound the same can…
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Shortest Words (Just One Vowel)
Words with just one vowel make an interesting set. Remember, in Spanish one vowel means one vowel sound and also one vowel symbol (a, e, i, o, u). If you take into account that every Spanish syllable needs at least one vowel sound, and that every word has at least one syllable (obviously), this makes…
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100 Words (Most Prevalent Words in Schools)
My kids’ school district, in California, uses a guide with the 100 first words the students in the bilingual program must get familiar with first. This list is not a subset of any grammatical categorization. It is a set of random words that includes any parts of the speech (nouns, adjectives, etc.). Verbs appears in…
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1000 Words (First Words in Movies)
One jewel of the Wiktionary.com is a list of a the 1000 words that appear more frequently in dialogues. This is Wikcionario:Frecuentes-(1-1000)-Subtítulos de películas. The source of this survey analyzed the words used in movies. This is a large sample of words from a sample of several movies, so statistically speaking, it gives us a…
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Spanglish (Neither Nor)
Spanish-English? Yes, please. No, thank you. No matter what you think about this fusion, it is. This is a fact. So it is useful to know it exists and what it really is. Code switching is the mixture of words of one language in the sentence of another language. You can hear sentences like “Tomaré…
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False Friends (False Cognates)
False cognates are those words that you think you know them but you don’t, so, you think you know the meaning (because it is similar to an English word), but its meaning is different. For example: preservative and preservativo looks and sounds similar, but preservativo means “condom.” The number of false friends between Spanish and…