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Test your Spanish vocabulary with this new matching exercise containing an additional thirty words. Match each Spanish word on the left with its English equivalent on the right. Check the answer key at the bottom of the quiz to see how well you did. Remember that Spanish and Portuguese are closely related, so watch out…

This week we’ll be turning our attention to another set of German-English false friends. As English is a Germanic language, there are many cognates between the two languages. However, this shared history also makes distinguishing between true cognates and false friends especially challenging. Be careful not to confuse the following German words with similarly spelled…

This week we’re going to look at ten more French idiomatic expressions. These basic idiomatic expressions will help you to increase your French comprehension and acceptance by native speakers. For each expression, we’ve included a literal translation, the figurative meaning, and (where application) an equivalent English idiom.   If you need more help with idioms,…

In this lesson, we’re going to look at twenty false friends between Chinese logographic characters and Japanese kanji. Because the Japanese concept of kanji has its origins in the more complicated, Chinese traditional characters, many kanji do indeed have the same or similar meanings to the Chinese characters from which they were borrowed. As with…

This week, we’re going to revisit the topic of one our earliest lessons: faux amis, or French false friends. Faux amis are especially tricky because modern English contains many words of French origin. It’s only natural to assume that a French word has the same meaning as a similarly-spelled English word. Watch out for following…

Loanwords are Japanese words that have been “borrowed” from other languages, usually English. Most loanwords are simply transliterations of their donor words. For example, コーヒー (kōhī) is the loanword for “coffee.” However, not all loanwords are so straightforward. Sometimes a loanword develops a different meaning or usage than its donor word. In other situations, the…

In this lesson, we’re going to look at Spanish diminutives and augmentatives. These suffixes can be added to nouns, adjectives, and adverbs and usually indicate smaller and larger size, respectively. However, they can have additional meanings depending on the context and choice of word.   Diminutives The Spanish diminutive usually indicates small size or affection…