separator

Learning Spanish & Etymology Pattern-Matching for Nerds

Afinar and Refine

Afinar, meaning “to tune” — as in, you tune your guitar — comes from the Latin finis, meaning, “border”: tuning a guitar is really finding the exact border between this note and the other one.

From the same Latin root finis, we get English words such as fine, refine (remember the re– prefix is just an intensifier), as well as the English finish.

Tuning your guitar, in other words, really is an act of refining the sounds.

The f-n root is clearly visible in all.

what is the etymological way to learn spanish?

Nerds love to pattern-match, to find commonalities among everything. Our approach to learning languages revolves (the same -volve- that is in “volver”, to “return”) around connecting the Spanish words to the related English words via their common etymologies – to find the linguistic patterns, because these patterns become easy triggers to remember what words mean. Want to know more? Email us and ask:
morgan@westegg.com

patterns to help us learn spanish:

Buy the Book!

For Nerds Learning Spanish via Etymologies