I’ve decided to add a new feature to this blog, a Spanish tip of the month. On the first of each month I am going to try to share some useful tidbit about Spanish, a Spanish phrase, Puerto Rican or other Latin American slang, a unique Spanish word or two, or some useful tips on Spanish.

For this month, I thought I’d share a fun one about -ar verbs. AR verbs are verbs that end in AR. They are usually pretty standard and conjugate fairly easily. Some of these include:

cantar: to sing
bailar: to dance
sentarse: to sit (yourself down -the se is reflexive)
pensar: to think

There are many, many -ar verbs out there. But if you are looking for an easy way to know a few Spanish words off the bat and you are an English speaker, look to English words that end in -ate. These words transfer almost perfectly into an -ar verb in Spanish, for example (por ejemplo):

educate: educar (in Spanish educar also means to instill manners)
celebrate: celebrar
manipulate: manipular
perforate: perforar
investigate: investigar

And on and on! Which ones can you think of?

To put it together in a sentence, you could say:

I like to ________ (3 syllable ate word)
I like to decorate.

Me gusta _____________ (take off the -ate and change it to -ar for a Spanish -ar verb)
Me gusta decorar.

-Or-
I am going to _________(-ate English word)
I am going to communicate.

Voy a _________ (-ar Spanish word)
Voy a comunicar.

Generally speaking this will work for practically all 3-syllable or longer verbs, but not all. With one and two syllable verbs it may or may not work.  Do not attempt this with words that are nouns (like classmate, candidate etc) it will not work. Also, while this should be obvious, I just want to point out that the pronunciation is different! Why does this work? Because most of these English words have their etymology in Latin, and of course Spanish is a Latin (Romance) language.

Here is a list of English words that end in -ate.  Not all of them will work (some are nouns not verbs), but you can play around with them.

Let me know what you think of this Spanish tip of the month and of the feature in general!