The summer holidays have already finished. In October we have been back to school (and «suffered» la vuelta al cole) for a couple of weeks, and teachers, students, parents and school staff have begun a new time with new projects and also perhaps with some propósitos de año nuevo (New (School) Year’s resolutions), for instance… learning a new language! 🙂

At escuela habla we take la vuelta al cole very seriously and have also a propósito de año nuevo: to help you improve your Spanish and how you learn it. That’s why we’d like to provide you with some tips, tricks, advice, resources, etc. to help you better understand Spanish or to learn any new language (this is also valid for Spanish native speakers 🙂 ). And here we’ll prove our point (para muestra, un botón):

In this blog entry we are going to help you learn some vocabulary. You may have noticed that we have highlighted three groups of words throughout the text:

1. la vuelta al cole;
2. un propósito de año nuevo;
3. para muestra, un botón.

Each of these three expressions above have something special, which may make them difficult to understand. Actually, other languages also combine words in a similar way as we’re about to explain. However, you may not know how these combinations work or the different types of word combinations we have in Spanish. Let’s start!:

La vuelta al cole.          (colocación)

Going back to school is a major event for most people, as we already said. It is indeed very important for children (for good and bad reasons 😉 ). Many Spanish-speaking children call the school cole (abbreviation of colegio). For this reason, the concepts vuelta and cole form a frequent combination of words, i.e. la vuelta al cole, which is known as colocación. To get the meaning of a colocación in Spanish, you just have to look up each word independently to understand its whole meaning. You can try by typing cole in the dictionary of our website (below). You’ll find there the definition of the word, examples of use, synonyms and its translation into English or other languages. Besides, you just have to type cole, since the free dictionary and most of the current dictionaries lead you to colegio.

Un propósito de año nuevo.          (colocación con locución)

Nowadays the concepts of propósito and año nuevo often come together (in Western culture at least), so we can say that this is a good botón de muestra (example) of a colocación. Analysing it, we can see that there is another group of words which you may have heard together: año and nuevo. This kind of short but more stable combinations (with their own meaning) are known as locuciones. You can usually find them in dictionaries, as it is not possible to understand the whole meaning of the locución just by joining the meaning of each word. You can either look up año nuevo or año, its main word. In the last case, you’ll have to skip the first definitions, but you can also learn many other word combinations by doing this!

Para muestra, un botón.          (refrán)

This example is slightly more complex, because it is almost impossible to understand the whole meaning of this expression just by joining the meaning of each word. Here we have a refrán (proverb), a sentence or popular saying which presents and opinion or a commonplace. To get the meaning of it we can look it up in the refranario of Molino de Ideas, where we can find its meaning, some examples, pictures and variations, as well as translations into English and German (if there are any).

let’s practice!:

Do you understand the meaning of all the word combinations we’ve been dealing with in this article? Would you be able to explain them in Spanish and show some examples? Then show everybody your expertise in the section of comments of this entry or on our Facebook site! 😉

Source:

Definitions: Wikipedia.

Photographs: Pixabay.