Cognate Pattern #1: TION to CIÓN (S03E01)

January 8th, 2016

And we’re back! Spanish Quickies, Season 3 starts… NOW!

Since the start of Gringo Español two years ago, we’ve mainly been focusing on grammar.

But to use grammar, you need words.

So for the next few videos, we’re going to focus on building up your vocabulary.

But what words to learn?

I say, learn words that are really easy to learn OR really common.

And no words are easier to learn than cognates.

Cognates are words that are the same in both English and Spanish.

And when I say they’re the same, I mean they look the same–they have the same origin (and usually mean the same thing).

Cognates are free words basically.

If you know a cognate in English, you already know that word in Spanish.

There are literally 1000’s and 1000’s of cognates. So there are 1000’s of Spanish words you already know. You just don’t know that you know them.

And that’s where today’s video comes in.

One thing that’s cool about cognates is, lots of them belong to these groups, where they all follow the same pattern. So once you know how to translate one word in the group, you know how to translate them all.

When making my premium course, Fun with Words, I discovered about 30 different cognate patterns (and made a video for each one).

So today, I’m going to show you the first cognate pattern, the TION to CIÓN words.

Let’s do this!

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