Spanish 'mediodía' means noon. It also means the south, and the reason for that is standing outside at midday and looking up.
'Mediodía' is two words joined: 'medio' ('middle') and 'día' ('day'). Both come straight out of Latin - 'medius' for the middle of a thing, 'dies' for a day. Put together, the compound says exactly what it means. The second sense is the one that catches people. Seen from Spain, and from most of Europe, the noon sun stands in the southern half of the sky, so the word for the middle of the day became a word for that direction as well. French did the same with 'midi' and Italian with 'mezzogiorno', and both still carry both meanings. The 'south' sense of 'mediodía' is the less usual one in Spanish now, but it's recorded, and it explains a word that otherwise looks like it's doing two unconnected jobs.
Eight large cards, plus a single reference sheet holding the whole word:
• the etymology comic - illustrated stage panels, one idea to a page, each with a short caption a learner can read on its own
• the word-history breakdown, reconstructed Proto-Indo-European through Latin to modern Spanish, with the compound set out in its two parts
• the cross-language panel, showing French 'midi' and Italian 'mezzogiorno' doing the same double work
• the family panel, which puts 'medianoche' on the same branch and is honest that English 'middle' is a distant cousin rather than a descendant
• the sources page, naming every reference the content is built from
• a short how-to-use guide for the adult
The PDF prints two ways. The large cards - one idea to a page - are for laminating and clipping onto a binder ring, so a child can handle the deck, turn cards over, and lay the stages out in order. You do that assembly yourself; there's no ready-made deck. The single sheet at the end holds the whole word on one page, needs no laminating and no cutting, and is the version to print for the middle of a lesson. You'll need a printer either way, and a laminator and a ring if you want the deck. The finished deck goes in a bag or on the table, not a pocket.
For personal use in home education and tutoring only.
Made first for tutoring students, but it suits a wider range:
• KS3 and KS4 learners meeting Spanish time and daily-routine vocabulary
• home-educated children learning Spanish
• learners with dyslexia or working-memory difficulties who find word lists hard to hold
• anyone who likes word origins, whether or not they speak Spanish
• parents working alongside a child, including those picking the Spanish up as they go
• adults coming back to Spanish after school
This isn't for a learner at the very start of Spanish. The cards assume the reader already knows 'día' and can read a joined-up Spanish word aloud - 'mediodía', 'medianoche' - even if they couldn't yet tell you what either one means.
Time vocabulary arrives early in Spanish and then keeps arriving: the school day, meal times, opening hours, timetables. 'Mediodía' turns up across all of it, and a learner who has memorised it as five syllables has nothing to fall back on the week it slips. Seeing that it's 'medio' plus 'día' hands them two words they already have and a compound they can rebuild from the parts. The 'south' sense gives a second handhold - a child who has worked out why noon and south are the same word tends not to lose either one.
Spanish does the same trick at the other end of the day, but the ending shifts: 'medianoche' is 'media' plus 'noche', because 'noche' is feminine. 'Día' takes the masculine 'medio' despite ending in '-a', which is one of the small oddities Spanish learners meet early and rarely get explained.
In El Taller Raíz, the words that sit alongside this one on the same topic are 'día', 'buenos días', 'hoy' and 'jornada' - 'jornada' is the free sample, so it's the cheapest way to see whether the format suits your learner.
On the same root: 'día', 'jornada' and 'jornal' all descend from Latin 'dies', so 'mediodía' is carrying half its ancestry in common with the whole of that group.
Across the shops: the direct cousins are French 'midi' and Italian 'mezzogiorno', which do the same double duty of noon and south.
Available now as a PDF download.
Spanish 'mediodía' means noon. It also means the south, and the reason for that is standing outside at midday and looking up.
'Mediodía' is two words joined: 'medio' ('middle') and 'día' ('day'). Both come straight out of Latin - 'medius' for the middle of a thing, 'dies' for a day. Put together, the compound says exactly what it means. The second sense is the one that catches people. Seen from Spain, and from most of Europe, the noon sun stands in the southern half of the sky, so the word for the middle of the day became a word for that direction as well. French did the same with 'midi' and Italian with 'mezzogiorno', and both still carry both meanings. The 'south' sense of 'mediodía' is the less usual one in Spanish now, but it's recorded, and it explains a word that otherwise looks like it's doing two unconnected jobs.
Eight large cards, plus a single reference sheet holding the whole word:
• the etymology comic - illustrated stage panels, one idea to a page, each with a short caption a learner can read on its own
• the word-history breakdown, reconstructed Proto-Indo-European through Latin to modern Spanish, with the compound set out in its two parts
• the cross-language panel, showing French 'midi' and Italian 'mezzogiorno' doing the same double work
• the family panel, which puts 'medianoche' on the same branch and is honest that English 'middle' is a distant cousin rather than a descendant
• the sources page, naming every reference the content is built from
• a short how-to-use guide for the adult
The PDF prints two ways. The large cards - one idea to a page - are for laminating and clipping onto a binder ring, so a child can handle the deck, turn cards over, and lay the stages out in order. You do that assembly yourself; there's no ready-made deck. The single sheet at the end holds the whole word on one page, needs no laminating and no cutting, and is the version to print for the middle of a lesson. You'll need a printer either way, and a laminator and a ring if you want the deck. The finished deck goes in a bag or on the table, not a pocket.
For personal use in home education and tutoring only.
Made first for tutoring students, but it suits a wider range:
• KS3 and KS4 learners meeting Spanish time and daily-routine vocabulary
• home-educated children learning Spanish
• learners with dyslexia or working-memory difficulties who find word lists hard to hold
• anyone who likes word origins, whether or not they speak Spanish
• parents working alongside a child, including those picking the Spanish up as they go
• adults coming back to Spanish after school
This isn't for a learner at the very start of Spanish. The cards assume the reader already knows 'día' and can read a joined-up Spanish word aloud - 'mediodía', 'medianoche' - even if they couldn't yet tell you what either one means.
Time vocabulary arrives early in Spanish and then keeps arriving: the school day, meal times, opening hours, timetables. 'Mediodía' turns up across all of it, and a learner who has memorised it as five syllables has nothing to fall back on the week it slips. Seeing that it's 'medio' plus 'día' hands them two words they already have and a compound they can rebuild from the parts. The 'south' sense gives a second handhold - a child who has worked out why noon and south are the same word tends not to lose either one.
Spanish does the same trick at the other end of the day, but the ending shifts: 'medianoche' is 'media' plus 'noche', because 'noche' is feminine. 'Día' takes the masculine 'medio' despite ending in '-a', which is one of the small oddities Spanish learners meet early and rarely get explained.
In El Taller Raíz, the words that sit alongside this one on the same topic are 'día', 'buenos días', 'hoy' and 'jornada' - 'jornada' is the free sample, so it's the cheapest way to see whether the format suits your learner.
On the same root: 'día', 'jornada' and 'jornal' all descend from Latin 'dies', so 'mediodía' is carrying half its ancestry in common with the whole of that group.
Across the shops: the direct cousins are French 'midi' and Italian 'mezzogiorno', which do the same double duty of noon and south.
Available now as a PDF download.
