English for Spanish speakers · part 2 of 22
Latin cognates
A cognate shares an ancestor in two languages and still looks and means roughly the same. English and Spanish have them by the thousand. It helps students to sort them into three groups.
Perfect cognates — identical spelling and meaning:
hospital · animal · natural · central · doctor · error · idea · region · superior
Near cognates — small, predictable spelling changes, same meaning:
| Spanish | English |
|---|---|
| cultura | culture |
| educación | education |
| música | music |
| momento | moment |
| teléfono | telephone |
| farmacia | pharmacy |
The exceptions to watch — words that look cognate but are not (the false friends of §8). Minuto → minute is a true cognate; librería → library is not (it means bookshop). The habit to build: when a student meets an unfamiliar English word with a Latin shape, their first guess should be the cognate meaning — with the false-friend list kept in reserve.