English for Spanish speakers

The head start they already have

The shared vocabulary students can read and guess before you teach a thing.

• Spanish → English word transformation rules — Predictable Spanish-to-English suffix patterns (-ción→-tion, -dad→-ty) that unlock thousands of English words for Spanish speakers.
• Latin cognates — The thousands of near-identical Latin-root words Spanish speakers already recognise in English, and how to use them.
• Anglo-Latin vocabulary — The Latin layer of English that overlaps with Spanish — the formal vocabulary Spanish speakers find easy.
• Recognising academic English — Why academic and formal English comes naturally to Spanish speakers, and how to leverage its Latinate vocabulary.
• Loanwords between English and Spanish — English words borrowed from Spanish and Spanish words borrowed from English — shared vocabulary in both directions.
• Thousands of words you already know — The huge shared English vocabulary Spanish speakers already command, and how to activate it.

The traps

The very similarity that helps students also lays a few traps — places where a familiar-looking word betrays them.

• Spanish–English false friends — Words that look the same but mean something different — actually, sensible, embarrassed, library — and what to say instead.
• Common direct-translation mistakes — Word-for-word translations from Spanish that produce wrong English, with the natural English instead.
• Translation traps — Spanish structures that don't map onto English — the traps that survive into otherwise-fluent speech.

Grammar that works differently

Structural habits where Spanish and English part ways. None are hard once seen — but each is invisible until named. Naming the pattern is half the lesson.

• Articles: Spanish vs English — When English uses a/an/the differently from Spanish — the article rules that trip Spanish speakers up.
• Words English omits or requires — When English drops words Spanish keeps, and demands words Spanish leaves out — subjects, articles, and more.
• Verbs that work differently — English verb patterns that diverge from Spanish — the tense and structure differences to teach.
• Prepositions Spanish speakers confuse — The English prepositions Spanish speakers most often get wrong, and the patterns that fix them.
• Spanish interference — How Spanish grammar habits leak into English, and how to spot and correct the interference.

Sounds and spelling

Spanish has five clean vowels and near-phonetic spelling. English has around twenty vowel sounds and spelling shaped by a thousand years of borrowing. Here are the parts that are hard because Spanish never trained the ear or mouth for them.

• Pronunciation problems for Spanish speakers — The English sounds Spanish speakers find hard, familiar words pronounced differently, and commonly mispronounced words.
• Common spelling problems — The English spelling patterns that trip up Spanish speakers, and how to master them.
• Silent letters in English — English silent letters (knife, hour, listen) that surprise Spanish speakers, and the rules behind them.

Putting words together

Knowing words is not the same as knowing which words go together — the combinations where English simply chooses differently from Spanish.

• English collocations that feel strange — The word partnerships that feel unnatural to Spanish speakers — make vs do and other high-frequency collocations.
• Expressions you can't translate literally — Spanish expressions that break when translated word-for-word, and their real English equivalents.
• Phrasal verbs with Spanish equivalents — English phrasal verbs mapped to the single Spanish verbs they replace — a shortcut for Spanish speakers.
• English idioms vs Spanish idioms — English idioms compared with their Spanish counterparts — same idea, different image.

One last difference: which English?

• British vs American vocabulary — The British/American vocabulary differences Spanish learners should know, and which to teach.