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RE: How people learn foreign languages.

in #teaching7 years ago

How interesting!!! Thank you for sharing the knowledge.

I had no idea that high of a percentage actually came from Latin not Germanic.

It's so fastinating and to think of all the variants of English you mentioned earlier play into all of it and of course slang terms.

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There's literally thousands of cognates going from English to Latin languages. In the case of Spanish, they usually adhere to some very easy rules. But there are a few of what we call "false friends". For example, "embarazado" in Spanish means "pregnant", although you'd think it would mean embarrassed. And it's not too hard to see how pregnancy and embarrassment could come from the same etymological origin, but nonetheless, they mean very different things.