Kilo Lingo

Spanish · Chapter 14 · Lesson 23 · Themed review

En casa

Room by room. Spanish has several words for room - habitacion, cuarto, sala, pieza - and they are not interchangeable.

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17-word session

A quick mix of exercises - recognise, recall, type and build each word. Miss one and it comes back round until it sticks.

Worth knowing

Spanish has four words for room and they are not interchangeable

English gets by with room and a modifier. Spanish has several words and expects you to pick.

is a room in general, and specifically a bedroom in a house or hotel. If you book a , you are booking a double room.

is also a room, and also a quarter. It is more colloquial than and much more common in Latin America. is my room in the way a teenager means it.

is a hall or a large public room: , waiting room. On its own, in much of Latin America, it is the living room.

is a room in parts of South America, a piece elsewhere, and a musical piece everywhere. It is the one to be careful with.

piso

is a flat, in Spain. It is also a floor, in the sense of a storey: . And in Latin America it is the floor you walk on, where Spain would say .

So means it is on the third floor, or it is on the ground, depending on which ocean you are nearer.

casa is not always a house

covers house and home both. a is I am going home, with no article, and the missing article is what makes it home rather than a house. a is I am going to the house, a specific building.

is home in the warm sense, the hearth, and it is much rarer in speech than English home. It turns up in advertising and in the phrase .

The furniture is where the false friends hide

is a table, and it is also the desk you work at, which Spanish is happy to leave unspecified. is a bed and nothing else, mercifully. is a key, and also a tap in much of Latin America, and also a spanner. If someone asks you to close the , they do not mean the door.

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