jornada (Spanish) – Structured Vocabulary Support
£2.00
Spanish already has a word for 'day' - 'día'. 'jornada' is its cousin: same Latin root, a different road into Spanish, and a wider meaning that carries a day's work and the distance you can cover on foot in a day.
The story starts with Latin 'dies', 'day'. From it came the adjective 'diurnus', 'daily', and then the noun 'diurnum', 'a day' - the same word used for a daily ration and for the day-book that recorded the day's business. Spanish took two branches of this one family. 'día' comes straight down from 'dies'. 'jornada' arrived by a longer route: the Real Academia Española says 'perhaps' through Occitan 'jornada', from 'jorn' 'day', itself from 'diurnus'. Same Latin origin, two different roads, two Spanish words that no longer look alike.
'jornada' holds three senses at once: a day, the working day, and a day's travel - which is why a day's march was 'una jornada'. Its close relatives 'jornal' (a day's wage) and 'jornalero' (a day-labourer) come from the same root.
The etymology comic - illustrated black-and-white panels, one idea to a panel, with short captions: the Latin day-family, the family tree, the split between 'día' and 'jornada', and the panel showing how 'jornada' came to hold its three senses
The word-history summary, Latin through Occitan to Spanish, laid out plainly
The same-family section, naming the Spanish relatives 'jornal' and 'jornalero' and the English cousins 'journal' and 'journey'
The sources page
The short how-to-use guide for the adult
This prints into two forms, and you choose which suits you. The large panels - one idea to a page - are made to be laminated and clipped onto a binder ring, so a child can handle the deck, turn the cards over, and lay the stages out in order. The single sheet at the end holds the whole word on one page, ready to print for the pencil case or the middle of a lesson, with no laminating or cutting. You laminate and bind the deck yourself - there's no ready-made deck - so you'll need a printer, and a laminator and a ring for the card form. Because the cards come apart, they can be reordered, matched, and sorted rather than only read.
For personal use in home education and tutoring only.
Built first for tutoring students, but it suits a wider range:
Learners taking Spanish at KS3 and KS4, including GCSE
Anyone who likes etymology or the Romance languages
Home-educated children
Specialist tuition students, including dyslexic and working-memory profiles
Parents working through it alongside a child
Adults returning to Spanish from school
This isn't built for a learner meeting Spanish for the first time. It assumes the reader has already come across 'jornada' or 'día' in a lesson or a text and wants to understand why the word means what it means, rather than learning the vocabulary cold.
Vocabulary that arrives as a list of words to memorise is hard to hold onto, and harder still for a learner with dyslexia. A word that comes with a reason behind it tends to stick better. 'jornada' is a good example: once a learner sees that it means a day, a day's work, and the distance you can cover in a day, and that it shares a root with 'journal' and 'journey', it stops being an arbitrary string of letters and starts to make sense.
The same root runs through the other shops - French 'jour' in L'atelier des mots and Italian 'giorno' in L'Officina Radice
The English cousins have their own free Wordhord cards: 'journey', 'journal', and 'diurnal' (the English form of the Latin 'diurnus' at the heart of this word)
The Compendium post on why word origins help with modern languages
Available now as a PDF download.
Spanish already has a word for 'day' - 'día'. 'jornada' is its cousin: same Latin root, a different road into Spanish, and a wider meaning that carries a day's work and the distance you can cover on foot in a day.
The story starts with Latin 'dies', 'day'. From it came the adjective 'diurnus', 'daily', and then the noun 'diurnum', 'a day' - the same word used for a daily ration and for the day-book that recorded the day's business. Spanish took two branches of this one family. 'día' comes straight down from 'dies'. 'jornada' arrived by a longer route: the Real Academia Española says 'perhaps' through Occitan 'jornada', from 'jorn' 'day', itself from 'diurnus'. Same Latin origin, two different roads, two Spanish words that no longer look alike.
'jornada' holds three senses at once: a day, the working day, and a day's travel - which is why a day's march was 'una jornada'. Its close relatives 'jornal' (a day's wage) and 'jornalero' (a day-labourer) come from the same root.
The etymology comic - illustrated black-and-white panels, one idea to a panel, with short captions: the Latin day-family, the family tree, the split between 'día' and 'jornada', and the panel showing how 'jornada' came to hold its three senses
The word-history summary, Latin through Occitan to Spanish, laid out plainly
The same-family section, naming the Spanish relatives 'jornal' and 'jornalero' and the English cousins 'journal' and 'journey'
The sources page
The short how-to-use guide for the adult
This prints into two forms, and you choose which suits you. The large panels - one idea to a page - are made to be laminated and clipped onto a binder ring, so a child can handle the deck, turn the cards over, and lay the stages out in order. The single sheet at the end holds the whole word on one page, ready to print for the pencil case or the middle of a lesson, with no laminating or cutting. You laminate and bind the deck yourself - there's no ready-made deck - so you'll need a printer, and a laminator and a ring for the card form. Because the cards come apart, they can be reordered, matched, and sorted rather than only read.
For personal use in home education and tutoring only.
Built first for tutoring students, but it suits a wider range:
Learners taking Spanish at KS3 and KS4, including GCSE
Anyone who likes etymology or the Romance languages
Home-educated children
Specialist tuition students, including dyslexic and working-memory profiles
Parents working through it alongside a child
Adults returning to Spanish from school
This isn't built for a learner meeting Spanish for the first time. It assumes the reader has already come across 'jornada' or 'día' in a lesson or a text and wants to understand why the word means what it means, rather than learning the vocabulary cold.
Vocabulary that arrives as a list of words to memorise is hard to hold onto, and harder still for a learner with dyslexia. A word that comes with a reason behind it tends to stick better. 'jornada' is a good example: once a learner sees that it means a day, a day's work, and the distance you can cover in a day, and that it shares a root with 'journal' and 'journey', it stops being an arbitrary string of letters and starts to make sense.
The same root runs through the other shops - French 'jour' in L'atelier des mots and Italian 'giorno' in L'Officina Radice
The English cousins have their own free Wordhord cards: 'journey', 'journal', and 'diurnal' (the English form of the Latin 'diurnus' at the heart of this word)
The Compendium post on why word origins help with modern languages
Available now as a PDF download.
