separator

Learning Spanish & Etymology Pattern-Matching for Nerds

Rubio and Ruby

The Spanish rubio (meaning “blonde,” as in the hair color) comes from the Latin rubeus, meaning “red”.

How did “red” come to mean “blonde”? In a world where everyone has very dark black hair… it’s easy to see how everyone could conflate blonde hair and red hair. The Romans didn’t know the Irish!

From the same Latin root, we get various English words including Ruby, the stone, and guess what color it is? We also get Rubric, which was originally religious directions that were written in… guess what color ink?

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