Bridge the Gap: Embrace Spanish-English Cognates for Fluent Communication!

Transparent Cognates

Welcome to our blog post about English to Spanish cognate hacks. What is a cognate you might ask?As we mentioned in our previous post, cognates are words that are “born together” or share a common history. If you haven’t already, check out our other post on cognates in a more general sense.

Of the top 5,000 words in Spanish, 2,700 are cognates to words in English and 1,000 are words derived from other words. This means you only need to learn 1,300 words to hit that 5,000 mark.

in theory

But how do you recognize cognates, and take advantage of these 2,700 free words?  You just need to learn a few sound or spelling correspondences!

The charts below don’t need to be memorized, just go over them and prime yourself to recognize the relationship between sounds and changes in your immersion.

Obscure Correspondencies

Up to this point, we mostly covered correspondencies that were very clear and easy to understand. Just as English has borrowed from Latin and French, Spanish also borrowed from Latin! Words directly from Latin are called cultismos, and words that are partially borrowed from Latin are called semicultismos.

However, unlike English, Spanish not only borrowed from Latin but also descended directly from it! This means that it has a large bank of vocabulary that underwent hundreds of years of sound changes. These words can be much trickier to identify, but being aware of them can be a huge boon!

Below you’ll see a list of English cognates, the inherited Spanish form, and the Latin borrow or semiborrowed forms if they exist:

Latin in Italics Learned Borrowings Underlined

Sound changes in bold