This tip will improve your Spanish listening and reading comprehension. All that’s needed is the ability to conjugate the common verbs such as ‘tener’ and ‘poner’.
Example of how it works: You hear “mantengo”, which doesn’t seem to have anything in common with English. But you know that “tengo” is a form of “tener”, so you can un-conjugate the verb to “mantener”, and suddenly it’s a lot more recognizable (it means “to maintain”).
It’s quite common that a conjugated verb has little resemblance to English while the infinitive form is recognizable, so look for endings that you know to be conjugations of common Spanish verbs.
For whatever reason, based on how the two languages evolved, I suppose, this works for a lot of verbs:
Examples with Tener
- contener, contain
- detener, detain
- mantener, maintain
- obtener, obtain
- retener, retain
Examples with Poner
- descomponer, decompose
- imponer, impose
- posponer, postpone
- proponer, propose
- suponer, suppose
- componer, compose
Examples with Venir
- convenir, convene
- prevenir, prevent
It also works for the past participle tense. For example, if you know that “puesto” is the past participle of “poner” then you can figure out what “compuesto” means using the same trick: compuesto => componer => compose, the past participle of which is “composed”, which is in fact what “compuesto” means.
