Lesson Four: Similar Words - words ending 'ion'

Learn even more Spanish words instantly simply by understanding a few simple rules about English words that end 'ion'!

OK, even more good news! If you have a word in English which ends 'ion' you'll find the Spanish version is very similar or even the same.

Spanish	English
Opinión	Opinion
Pasión	Passion

Now you might have noticed the accent on the last 'o'. That's telling us to move the stress from the penultimate syllable to the letter with the accent on it. This is a general rule throughough Spanish so whereever so see any kind of accent over a letter you know that is the syllable to be stressed.

Also, as we have seen before, the Spanish language doesn't really do double letters so in 'Passion' we drop one 's' and pronounce the remaining one as 's', not as 'sh' in English for the double 's'.

Words Ending 'tion'

Most English words ending 'tion' can be transferred into spanish simply by changing the 't' to a 'c' and adding an accent to the last 'o'.

Spanish	English
Organización	Organization
Preparación	Preparation
Generación	Generaction
Confirmación	Confirmation

Now you might have heard some of these words pronounced differently - 'ci' pronounced as 'th'. This is the way it is said in most of Spain while the softer version used here is more usual in the rest of the Spanish speaking world.

It doesn't matter which one you use, you will be understood. I found it easier to use the 'th' version because Spain is my intended destination and also because it just helped me remember how the word was spelt.

For the Language Transfer course however you will only here the soft version.

Nice to know!

Have a look at that word 'Confirmación' again. In Spanish 'Con' means 'With' and 'Firma' means 'Signature' and this is the root of the English word 'Confirm'. When you say "I confirm I will do it" you are partly speaking the latin and meaning "I, with signature, will do it"

So there are two more words in Spanish you won't forget - 'con' and 'firma'!

Spanish	English
Conversación	Conversation
Confrontación	Confrontation

Nice to know!

Now you'll start to notice more and more English words that have their roots in Spanish:

Conversation - 'con', 'vers', "with verse".

Confrontation - 'con', 'fronta', "with" and the Spanish word for forehead is "frente" which has been changed slightly to "fronta" in English.

When you spot these it makes it much easier to learn Spanish vocabulary rather than just trying to memorize lists of words.

Spanish	English
Complicación	Complication

Finding verbs from words that end 'ation'

So far we've just looked at stright up vocab. Now we're going to see how we can get many Spanish verbs when we know the English word related to it!

For English verbs ending 'ation' we take off the 'tion' and add an 'r'

Spanish	English
Preparación	Preparation
Preparar	To prepare

We took the 'tion' off 'Preparation', added an 'r' and got 'preparar', the Spanish verb for 'to prepare'. We can also do this for words ending 'acion'

All in this rule gives us around 1,000 verbs that we actually now know in Spanish because we know the English!

Spanish	English
Generación	Generaction
Generar	To generate
Confirmación	Confirmation
Confirmar	To confirm
Complicación	Complication
Complicar	To complicate
Cooperación	Cooperacion
Cooperar	To cooperate
Cancelación	Cancelation
Cancelar	To cancel
Exploración	Exploration
Explorar	To explore

Making sentences with Quiero

'Quiero' in Spanish means "I want". It can also be used as a soft 'love'. "Te quiero" means "I love you" in the way you might say it to close friends but if you watch any Spanish soap operas you will hear it there as in "I want you because I love you".

Spanish	English
Quiero	I want

One other thing to notice here is when you put 'q' and 'u' together the 'q' takes a 'k' sound.

My tip!

One other thing to notice here is when you put 'q' and 'u' together the 'q' takes a 'k' sound. Watch out for this in the future and you'll spot the pattern making it easier to pronounce new words correctly.

Now we're ready to create sentences!

Spanish	English
Quiero preparar	I want to prepare
Quiero cooperar	I want to cooperate
Quiero cancelar	I want to cancel
No quiero cancelar	I don't want to cancel
Quiero explorar	I want to explore

Introducing 'Me'

The spelling of 'me' is the same in Spanish as in English but obviously (because you now know 'e' is always pronounced as in 'exit') 'me' sound different in Spanish.

Spanish	English
Me	Me

While in English we might say I want to prepare myself in Spanish we say "I want to prepare me".

Spanish	English
Quiero prepararme	I want to prepare myself

Notice that there is no space between 'preparar' and 'me'. It's not a typo(!) and we'll see this pulling together of words much more later.

You might also be thinking that this sounds very formal. In English we are far more likely to say "I want to get ready" and latin words like 'prepare myself' are for speaking more elegantly.

Another example might be 'find' and 'encounter'. Generally speaking the more every day words like 'find' are germanic and the more flowery version is 'latin'. However Spanish is street latin so these formal sounding words (in English are actually every day words in Spanish.

Lesson Five: Starting to use the Thinking Method