Nada

[wrholt]

Originally Posted by Depilego

I'm never going to learn Spanish. Those don't make sense.

They will make sense, eventually. English also has its own share of homographs and homonyms.

Consider some examples of the many sets of English words that have the same spelling, same pronunciation, or both:

- read (present tense), read (past tense, past participle), red
- lead (present tense), lead (past tense, past participle), led
- fast (quick, rapid), fast (completely still)
- sanction (encourage, allow), sanction (condemn)
- write, right, rite
- sight, site
- to, two, too
- their, there, they're
- least, leased
- slay, sleigh
- slight, sleight
- record (notation, recording), record (verb)
- produce (vegetables), produce (make)
- made, maid
- male, mail

We generally have no trouble understanding any of these words in context, because most of the time only one of them makes sense within the context.

The same thing is true with the word pairs in Spanish: nada = "nothing" generally cannot appear in the same places in a sentence where nada = "he/she/you/it swims" can appear. This is also true of the words traje = "I brought" and traje = "suit (clothing)".