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Learning Spanish & Etymology Pattern-Matching for Nerds

Coche – Coach

The Spanish for “car”, coche, on the surface sounds nothing like the English for the same — or any similar word.

But etymologically, it comes from the same root as the English, coach. Think of it in the old-fashioned sense: the coach class on a train!

All come from the same root: the Hungarian kocsi (Hungarian is unrelated to English or Spanish, so there is no deeper root), named after the village where the first coach, in the very old sense — a large carriage — was created.

It’s interesting how coach has been downgraded as a word in English: it was first the luxurious way to travel, and now it is the economy class of a train.

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:

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For Nerds Learning Spanish via Etymologies