Encanto

I’ve just watched the Disney film “Encanto” and there was plenty of Spanish in it

I’ve just watched the Disney film “Encanto”, and there was plenty of Spanish in it, so I thought I’d write a quick article about how we can use any bit of Spanish we find to improve our language skills.

What is “Encanto” about?

The film is about a family who live in a magical house, but then the house starts to lose its magical abilities, and it’s up to Mirabel to figure out why.

Encanto

The word “encanto” has quite a few different translations. It can mean:

a spell / charm / beauty / attractiveness / loveliness

Have a look at it on WordReference: encanto

I love it

But there is also a verb, “encantar”. If you’ve learnt any Spanish before, you might have seen the phrase, “me gusta”. Well, “encantar” is used a lot like that.

me encanta — I love / I love it

You can put any verb on the end of “me encanta” to say what it is you love doing:

me encanta cantar — I love singing
me encanta hablar español — I love speaking Spanish
me encanta viajar — I love travelling

You can also put any noun on the end of “me encanta”, but there is one thing to remember. Sometimes, it’s useful to look at the literal meaning of phrases in order to understand how they work grammatically. If you look at “me encanta” literally, you’ll see it means “it makes me happy”, so when you put a verb on the end, you get:

me encanta cantar — I love singing (it makes me happy to sing)
me encanta viajar — I love travelling (it makes me happy to travel)

If you put a noun on the end of “me encanta”, it means “noun makes me happy”

me encanta el queso — I love cheese (cheese makes me happy)
me encanta esta película — I love this film (this film makes me happy)
me encanta el vino — I love wine (wine makes me happy)