Spanish in Cabo

  Hello friends,   In these 5 minutes of Spanish in the middle of the week, we are going to reflect on the word "hecho", but this time with an aitch.   Remember that last Wednesday we talked about the difference between: “echo esto al bote de basura” (I throw this in the trash can) y “hecho en China” (Made in China).   We said that echo without aitch is from the verb echar (to throw away) and hecho with aitch, is the past participle of the verb hacer (made or done) or a noun.   The cake is made (hecho) with flour, eggs and butter.   The cake is made with love   We could analyze the verb hacer (to make or to do) but, it has many meanings according to the context, impossible for these 5 minutes of Spanish.  So, let's talk only about its participle: “hecho” and the noun “hecho”.   According to the dictionary “hecho” has several meanings and uses   It's what happens, it's an event.   In English it's v...

1 English version  Hi, how are you? We met again in the 5 minutes of Spanish in the middle of the week. If you are an English speaker and you are learning Spanish, there are a lot of words you already know. This means that you have a great advantage in your learning, compared to a person born in Japan or China, for example. There are words that are the same in both languages, they are cognates, they have the same origin: Latin. traffic        tráfico per cent     por ciento executive   ejecutivo                debate      debate popular       popular client          cliente fantastic     fantástico But... there's always a but. Sometimes, we have false cognates or false friends. That is to say words that are similar in form but their...

Recuerdo que en la biblioteca de la casa de mi abuela, había un libro antiguo, muy grande y  con hermosas ilustraciones, que trataba sobre la vida de Benjamín Franklin. Era uno de los personajes que mi abuelo, Vicente Algorta Guerra, al que no conocí, pero admiro. (I remembered that in my Grandma house, there used to be a book (old, big and with beautiful images) about Benjamoin Franklin life.It belonged to my Grandpa who admired him). Pasaba mucho tiempo, cuando la visitaba, leyendo (en español), la vida y la obra de este interesante personaje de la historia de los EEUU. En realidad, las ideas y escritos de Benjamín se difundieron por toda América Latina, incluso durante la época de la colonia española, ¡y eso que no tenían Facebook! (I used to spent a lot of time reading in Spanish this book. Actually, his articles and books were reading for all the politics even during the Revolution time and they didn´t have Facebook!) Respecto a la infl...