Do you realize that you already know hundreds, if not thousands, of Spanish words? In this second of two articles we will highlight the way in which the English and Spanish languages share hundreds of words, words that you will be able to use every day.

In the first article we looked at the words are identical in both languages, identical in spelling and meaning, this time we will look at words which are spelled slightly differently but are so close as to be easily usable.

No "TH" In Spanish.

If you come across a word that looks familiar but is subtly different it may be a victim of "missing H syndrome". You will hardly ever get the letters T and H together in Spanish, so words in Spanish that look unfamiliar may be more obvious when an H is added . Examples of this include; Cathedral comes from catedral, thesis from tesis, marathon from maraton, thermal from termal and autor is author, I bet you can guess what matematico is? See, Spanish can be easy!

The th sound is replaced by a flat t sound as in cat.

No "TION" In Spanish.

As well as having no TH words, Spanish has no words that end in TION. So instead of edition we have edicion, the T is replaced by a C. when armed with this fact its makes it easy to work out what these words mean; atencion, asociacion, coleccion, adicion, and combinacion.

There are obvious but slight changes in some of the spellings but knowing what to look for will help you identify words.

The sound of the word changes as well as the spelling, the sh sound of a word like edition, changes to a thee sound in edicion.

Adding A Vowel.

There many easy Spanish words that differ from the English version by only one letter, that letter is a vowel and it comes at the end of a word. This is because the Spanish language assigns a gender to lots of words, if the gender is male the word ends in O, if the gender is female it ends in A.

So a Spanish word like apartamento, is obviously apartment, it has been given the masculine ending. Other similar words are; bulbo (bulb), busto (bust, as in sculpture), cataclismo (cataclysm), concepto (concept), candidato (male candidate) and producto (product).

The same rule applies to words ending in A, they have been given the feminine ending, words like; acrobata (acrobat), candidata (female candidate), diagrama (diagram), epica (epic), ilusionista (illusionist) and planeta (planet).

As shown above words like candidate when Spanish can end in either O or A depending on the person being described, but that should not stop you realizing what the word is.

Thanks for taking the time to read this article, no language rules are ever 100% but Spanish is a quite well defined language so hopefully these few tips should make it a little bit easier to learn Spanish.

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Will Craig is the webmaster at www.howtoimproveyourspanish.com