Kilo Lingo

Spanish · Chapter 40 · Lesson 22 · Themed review

En casa, cada rincon

The house in detail: the rooms you did not have words for the first time round, and the furniture in them.

Practise this lesson

19-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

The ceiling and the roof are different words, and so are the walls

You did the house in chapter 14, room by room. This is the second pass, and its theme is that Spanish is unusually precise about which side of a surface you are standing on.

techo and tejado

is the ceiling, seen from inside. is the roof, seen from outside, and it is built from teja, a roof tile.

English says roof for both and only reaches for ceiling when it has to. Spanish makes you decide where you are standing.

pared, muro, muralla

Three words for a wall.

is a wall of a room, an interior wall. is a freestanding wall, outdoors, a garden wall or a retaining wall. Muralla is a city wall, the fortified kind, and if a Spanish town has one it is usually the reason tourists go.

The Berlin Wall is . The wall you hang a picture on is .

suelo

is the floor, and also the ground, and also soil. One word for the surface you stand on, indoors or out. It is also the first person of , to usually do something, so means I usually eat late and has nothing to do with floors.

The rooms you did not have words for

is the living room in Spain, and a formal reception room elsewhere. is the dining room, built transparently from . is the bedroom, from .

That transparency is worth pausing on. Spanish names rooms after what you do in them far more consistently than English does, and once you notice it you can guess a room you have never met.

The furniture

is a piece of furniture, and is furniture collectively. Spanish counts it; English treats it as a mass and needs pieces of.

is a drawer, and it is (box) with an augmentative: a big box. Same trick as being a little bag, running the other way.

is a mirror. is a lamp. Both are close enough to their English equivalents to be free.

Words in this theme

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