Spanish is one member of the group of modern languages which are derived from Latin, the language of Ancient Rome. Other languages in this group include French, Portuguese, Italian and even -surprise, surprise – Rumanian. All of these languages share many common elements including tenses, gramatical rules and tonnes upon tonnes of words.
Unlike Spanish, English isn’t directly derived from Latin, but it has taken thousands of words from Latin. It has also taken many thousands of words from French, which, of course, IS a Latin language.
As a result of this extensive ‘borrowing’, English has heaps of Latin-derived words, and the great majority can also be found in Spanish, with a small retouch here and there.
This is fantastic news if you are learning Spanish, because you’ll instantly be able to recognise hundreds, if not thousands, of Spanish words.
There are so many related words that we’ve broken this class into two parts. Even then, we will still only be able to show you a small fraction of all the words which are shared. However, we have made an effort to choose the ones which we think you’ll find most useful!
We’ll look at each group of words one at a time.
Words which end in ‘TION‘ in English will end in ‘CIÓN‘ in Spanish. Don’t forget the accent! These words are virtually always nouns:
*Spanish has very few words which start in ‘S’, but lots of words which start ‘ES’. More on that in a later class!
Example phrases:
If you want to see more questions like that last one, then take a look at our course on Spanish for travellers, which is packed full of essential words, phrases and questions for when you are travelling in Spain or Latin America.
The related adjectives -where they exist- also look very similar to their English counterparts:
Unlike the ending ‘CIÓN’ there is no accent on the ‘O’ when a word ends with ‘CIONAL’:
Correct: nacional, emocional…
Incorrect:naciónal,emociónal…
Here are some phrases:
**Notice again how an English word starting in ‘S’ will start with ‘ES’ in Spanish?
Now, it’s actually quite difficult, if not impossible, to find Spanish verbs which are exactly the same as their English equivalent. However, there are an enormous number of Spanish verbs which share common Latin roots with the English language counterpart. Let’s have a look at a few examples:
Here are some phrases which use these verbs:
We also have the Romans to thank for the calendar which we use today. And yes, the names for the months of the year in Spanish look very similar to the months of the year in English. They even sound similar too!
See for yourself: Months in Spanish
In the second part of this class on the Spanish which you already know, we’ll be taking a look at another batch of word groups which have shared Latin roots.
The image in the header is the Roman aquaduct at Segovia in central Spain.
By Felver Alfonzo (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 es], via Wikimedia Commons
How to introduce others in Spanish 
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