When you’re studying the Spanish language, there may be a lot of words and known English terms in your head which could leave you hanging for the Spanish translation. Sometimes, it’s easier to hold on to the English word and then express the rest of the sentence in Spanish. We just think this way of communicating while still learning the Spanish language is excusable because anyway, it can be understood by the receiver.

But all great things come from small origins. When we allow ourselves to dwell on ‘what’s easier’ compared to ‘what’s right’, we tend to carry this attitude to the end of our days or the time we learn and apply the entire language to say the least.

For instance, the English symbol @ can be translated in pure Spanish. Not so many people know this and probably other English words as well which we don’t hear often used by native Spanish speakers. But this symbol has a Spanish translation which means arroba and the irony here is that this word has been around long before the word e-mail came to life.

Another interesting thing about arroba is that it’s been use originally for liquid measurement back in the day and though it wasn’t considered the standard or official measurement, it was of good use on the local Arabic regions.

The use of arroba has been long used as the symbol @ and was developed later for email addresses. This is also done to simply avert from being copied by spam robots in email servers.

The use of the word arroba in Spanish can be done simply just like how you should pronounce an email address. For example, juan.delacruz@car.com is read out as juan punto delacruz arroba car punto com. The usual dot or period that we see in any email address around the world is read out as punto in Spanish.

Shareen Aguilar
www.learn-spanish-program.com