I think I’d like to learn Spanish. It seems to me to combine a large amount of speakers in various different parts of the world with the relative ease of learning another European language. Anyone here learn Spanish in adulthood and how hard did you find it?
I currently am fluent in English (it being my mother tongue), middling at French and not too great at Irish.
Does learning as a teenager count as ‘‘adulthood’’? I had my first serious Spanish class freshman year of high school… near the end or possibly beyond the language-acquisition age. I’ve briefly studied other languages – German and Greek – both freaking impossible compared to Spanish. I chose to study the language in college because I love literature but wanted more of a challenge than just English.
I find that I pick up the basics of any language very quickly and have an intuitive grasp of grammatical constructions – but now that I am at an advanced-to-fluent level of Spanish, I am frustrated as hell. It is very difficult to achieve perfection in a foreign language – maybe impossible. I’m not pleased with that fact–what is ‘‘hard’’ about the language to me is mastering all those finer points – slang, understanding varied dialects, avoiding miscommunication, making grammatical errors when cognitively you know better – that is probably part of learning any language.
But it is still great fun, and I dunno what country you live in, but Spanish could not possibly more relevant in the U.S. right now. It is an extremely marketable skill to have, and there are all sorts of ways to make yourself useful with it.
And the basics really aren’t very difficult to learn at all. There are a lot of Spanish/English cognates that often make it easy to locate a word in Spanish just by nature of knowing it in English. Sometimes you’re wrong, but the speaker will know what you’re talking about because the sound is similar. It’s an easy language to troubleshoot I guess you could say. There are no unfamiliar sounds and pronunciation is very straightforward.
I can actually speak a bit of German too. I find it easy enough, I’ve acquired bits and pieces having done it in our equivalent of high school for 3 years. I have an in-law who is German too so that has given me more opportunity to pick up more Deutsch.
I live in Ireland, which is a part of the EU, so Spanish is useful here too. I had noticed how prevalent Spanish speaking is in some American cities I’ve visited.
My ex-wife learned to speak it in just six weeks.
But she’s a freak like that.
I’m learning it now. I learned French when I was in high school, and I’m doing okay learning Spanish in college, but it is difficult for me. Not much else to add, just that I know it’s much easier for a child to learn, but not impossible for (most) adults.
Brendon
I took one year of Spanish as a senior in high school, and a couple other classes in grad school when I was in my 20s. I also lived in Panama for almost two years then, but in an environment where most people spoke English. And I took some other conversation classes and private tutoring when I was in my 30s.
I did not, however, become really fluent until I moved to Panama when I was 41 and in a more immersive environment than before. But while I am reasonably fluent now, because I didn’t really get the right expose until I was fairly old I won’t ever be bilingual.
You can certainly learn Spanish in adulthood. It is not a particularly difficult language for an English speaker; IMO it is significantly easier than French and far easier than Irish. (It is more regular in grammar, spelling, and pronunciation than either of those). However, most people I know who have achieved bilingualarity had pretty intensive exposure to the other language by their early 20s at the latest. After that it’s difficult.
When I was 32, I took an 8 week crash course in conversational Indonesian. 27 years later, I can still speak it to some degree.
Next year I want to go spend two weeks in Cuernavaca at one of their homestay language schools. Heard about it here on the Dope. I’ll let you know.
I have been taking lessons for a couple of years. (Did you learn any Arabic? No, just Spanish.) I find it a nice recreation and a preparation for my Mexican/Cuban retirement. People tell me I am an Intermediate now, and suppose I will progress once I get a chance to live it full-time.
All in all, I am very proud of myself and well ahead of other retirees in Mexico.
If you’ve had Irish, Spanish will be a piece of cake. The two verbs for “to be” (*ser * and estar) will remind you of is and tá, only they’ll behave more “normally” within a sentence. (That is, more like English does). Other “foreign language” things that throw learners are gender (which both Irish and French have), and you’ll be delighted that Spanish only has a handful of prepositions: conmigo, contigo, and *consigo * for leam, leat, and leis.
Spanish is twice as easy to pronounce as French and seventy times as easy as Irish.
Both Irish and French will give you a leg up on the vocabulary.
thousand: mil (Sp) / míle (Ir) / mille (Fr)
each: cada (Sp) / cach (Ir) / chaque (Fr)
night: noche (Sp) / oíche (Ir) / nuit (Fr)
(The Irish isn’t always cognate, sometimes it’s just a useful mnemonic.)
Irish each = gach
Thanks for the primer!
I only had one intensive semester of German (the equivalent of two semesters); I was just doing it for fun, and eventually my college schedule couldn’t accommodate it any longer. I was moving up pretty quickly–my prof was going to have my skip Semester 3–but because I only studied it for one summer, I lost it just as quickly. Though I was recently in a German airport and I was surprised with how fast it all started to come back when I heard folks speaking German.
To give you an idea of how prevalent Spanish-speaking is in the U.S. – I work in a call center for a national organization. 30% of our total call volume is Spanish-speaking clients.
I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I didn’t know there was any such thing as an Irish language. Is it very different from English?
I spent 4 years in High School learning French, and I can manage enough to have basic conversations with people/order food in restaurants/ask for directions/etc- I’ve visited France a couple of times and it’s been very useful.
Interestingly, when my fiancee and I visted Tijuana recently, I was amazed how many of the signs, billboards, notices, and posters I could read (most of them as it turned out). The problem is, I couldn’t understand anyone who was speaking to me in Spanish, and my own command of spoken Spanish is effectively non-existent. I know Spanish and French are related (they’re both Romance languages), so the thought occurs that it should be possible for me to learn Conversational Spanish without a spectacular amount of difficulty.
Then again, I’d also like to learn Swahili, for no other reason than it would be a random and useful skill to have on the CV and to impress people with at parties. 
And the Irish language is one of the Gaelic languages and indeed very different from (ie, totally unlike) English…
As a note of interest, Irish used to be cited in articles on Chomskyan syntax all the time, since it’s a verb-initial language and one of the big holes in Chomsky’s early model of syntax is that it didn’t handle VSO languages very well.
As a second note that I suspect will be of significantly more interest, “Leprechaun” is apparently spelled “Leipreachán” in Irish. (We borrowed examples from Irish extensively in one of my seminars. Everybody likes Leprechauns, and since it was in every single example sentence you wouldn’t believe some of the crazy shit that bastard got up to.)
We started taking Spanish lessons at age late 50s. It was only once a week for a couple of hours, but it’s surprising how quickly you pick it up. The problem is that we got so little opportunity to use it. As with any language learning, you have to study and practice in order to retain it. The biggest problem I had was that when in a bind to recall a word, French always intruded, and occasionally Portuguese. Quel cretin, moi!
Irish language = Gaelic or Gaeilge which is a significantly different language to English. I believe English and German are more closely related.
Irish is related closely enough to Scots Gaelic and is a distant cousin of Welsh.
You might be interested in try mango. It’s a free online language program. I haven’t tried their Spanish, but I’ve been very impressed with the Japanese program.
Very distant cousin - IIRC Manx is the other (extinct as a native tongue) language with close connections to Irish and to Gaelic. Welsh is closer to Cornish and Breton, the latter still alive but only just.