separator

Learning Spanish & Etymology Pattern-Matching for Nerds

Tarde and Retard

The common Spanish tarde, “late”, is a close cousin of the English retard.

Retard is literally the re- prefix (which just adds emphasis) and the Latin tardare, which means, “slow, stupid.”

From tardare we also get the Spanish tarde. So, the ones that are the stupidest do things slowest — literally!

Of course, we also get the English tardy from the same root as well.

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