Someone compliments you on being “educado” or “educada” in Spanish and they know nothing about where or if you have studied. What’s going on? The answer: (Spanish) educado = (English) well-mannered, polite Ok, now that we’ve figured out that they...

There are different Spanish words for the English word “season”, depending on what you are referring to. Here are the main divisions: Time of year (usually associated with weather) = estación Specific activity or event (like harvest) = temporada /...

A nice example of an expression which can’t be translated literally. The verb “arrimar” means “to move/bring … closer” in, for example, a sentence like this: El arrimó el sillón a la pared = He pushed/moved the armchair up against the...

In this post, I’m not going to discuss whether “deber” is translated as “must” or “should”. You can already find lots of discussion of that topic on the Internet. I’m going to translate it as “should” for the purposes of this article. Instead, I want...

This is an odd one among the false cognates between English and Spanish. The two words have similar meanings in each language, the main difference being that the English word “disgust” is much stronger than Spanish “disgusto”. The Spanish version is...