I’ve casually studied French, Chinese and Spanish and in terms of spoken language I find Spanish the hardest. The inflection of verbs is insane!
I also think people overrate the similarity of Spanish and English vocabulary. Most of the shared words are “big words” and the most common phrases in English tend to be of Germanic extraction.
I’ve been living in a Spanish speaking country close to 5 months now and still haven’t picked it up.
It ain’t easy!
I suspect that people are actually saying that Spanish is less difficult for English-speakers to learn than many other languages. This may be true, but on the other hand, no language, not even Esperanto, is actually easy to learn. Some are merely less difficult than others. (At least for me. I am currently bludgeoning my way into French…)
My wife has been working on Rosetta Stone and another Polish course for months now. Comparatively, Spanish is much easier. Because, you know, cognates and shit.
If you want to speak textbook Spanish, I’m sure it’s difficult. But if you just want to communicate with ordinary people, I’ve found it comes fairly easily.
I think you mean conjugation of verbs. That is the most difficult part of Spanish, sure. The pronunciation is straightforward and clear – all sounds except the rolled rr are present in English. If you have a broad knowledge of Latin roots it will make the going easy. Another thing that lubricates the facilitation is the presence of a very attractive member of the opposite sex who only speaks Spanish. You might try that route.
I think any of the Romance languages are the easiest (and of similar difficulty level) for English speakers to learn. Using the same alphabet is the most important, followed by cognates, and familiarity with loan words.
Verb conjugations are inflections (wiki link).
One of the things that makes Spanish relatively easy for English speakers is that they can fairly easily learn to make or approximate all the sounds. This is much harder for Chinese. Another is that the grammar is comparatively similar to English, though the devil is in the details like those conjugations.
I am fluent in Japanese (professional translator and interpreter), but I also have studied Chinese, Vietnamese, French, and Spanish. I agree that Spanish is not easy.
No language is easy, of course, but is Spanish easier or harder in some ways than other languages?
The easy part is the writing system. It is very regular: if you know English, you can learn to sound out Spanish in a few hours, really. I would also say that Spanish pronunciation is not conceptually very difficult. That does not mean it’s easy to pronounce the words like a native, but the sounds are not hard to understand. The cognate words do help a lot.
What’s harder about Spanish than Japanese? As you said, the verb inflections. That stuff’s tiresome. People speak really fast, and listening is hard too.
Overall, Japanese is harder. A lot harder and more time-consuming, mostly because of the writing system. But I never found Spanish to be super easy…
“And the Hebrews do it backwards which is absolutely frightful!” – My Fair Lady
After five years of Hebrew school, it was all I could not to laugh when hearing some of my new public school friends whine that Spanish was hard. I certain think it’s one of the easier languages for an English speaker to learn.
I always thought that both French and Spanish were similar in the number and types of their inflected verb conjugations – substantially none of which is present in English.
The difficulty of learning French (for an English speaker) is all the strange sounds, especially all the odd vowel sounds. Not to mention that two thirds of all written consonants are silent, and two thirds of all words sound alike. How does a language evolve with such a disparity between the written and spoken language?
English, OTOH, has a tremendous number of verbs that are conjugated irregularly.
I read a description of Hebrew once that pointed out that once you learn all the verb forms, the language follows them with “mathematical regularity”. Just learn those 12,000 verb forms and you’re set to go! And even there, there are some irregular verbs.
Languages “evolved” long before people started to write them (if that’s what you mean). If you mean, “How does a language come to have such disparity between its speech and writing?”, just look at Chinese, and then the question becomes kind of meaningless. Speech isn’t driven by writing. Speech occurs naturally, regardless of writing; writing is an artifice. There’s no organic reason for writing to necessarily mirror speech in some way.
I would disagree. My attitude throughout my time as an adult learner was a constant “Christ, that’s easy!”. I can only think of 2 or 3 things in the Swedish language that are somewhat challenging.
But as a native Spanish speaker I pity those people who try to learn it because it’s easy. God no it’s not. As a native speaker I never have to stop mid-sentence and decide whether the verb form I want to use is “tenía”, “tuve”, “he tenido”, “había tenido” or “hube tenido” - all of them used to express the past tense of “to have”. And pronunciation is somewhat simpler, but Castillian Spanish with its hard 'j’s and 'z’s can still be challenging.
I’ve studied several languages in school or otherwise…5+ years of French, 3 of Spanish, a year or thereabouts of German, Italian, Russian, and Serbian. Although I had some opportunity to practice Spanish in a natural setting, I can’t say I “got” it. However, my feeble excuse is that my Spanish classes were filled with some ethnic Spanish youth who made mockery of the class and drove my poor teacher to distraction. We really didn’t get into the conjugations/declensions/etc. that we should have by the time I gave it up.
I’d have to say that German was the easiest of all I dabbled in. Naturally, since English is such a bastardised Germanic language. That bore out when I did a bit of linguistics study.
Anyway, no, I wouldn’t say Spanish is easy. I coasted mostly due to French cognates. Many years later, I visited Puerto Rico, and I know I spoke the weirdest French-Spanish creole that never existed. :D:o
I do love the sound of the language, though, and I believe that the best love songs by far are in Spanish. Can’t promise I’m interpreting them perfectly, but I get the gist easily. Enjoy.
and so forth…
I took Spanish all four years of high school, and took a few classes in college.
One thing that helped me was the presence of Spanish in everyday life in the US. It’s not like Serbian or Klingon; Spanish words came at me on an almost daily basis. Our cable system (this was back in the 70’s) carried Chicago’s local station, WGN, which would often broadcast commercials that had at least a few words in Spanish. And then there was Sesame Street, which would broadcast whole segments in Spanish. When I got to high school, I already knew several dozen words; I particularly remembered abierto (open) and cerrado (closed) from a certain Sesame Street bit that I’d seen ten thousand times.
Irregular verb conjugation was always the hardest part of Spanish class for me, but I wouldn’t say the language was all that hard to learn. I feel like someone who speaks Spanish as a first language would struggle more with learning English, because we have more exceptions than they do.
I was in my 3rd year of French when I took my first Spanish class - in fact I took Spanish I in class and after school, the teacher tutored me in Spanish II so I could jump right into Spanish III the next year. I thought it was pretty easy, altho I occasionally struggled to keep French and Spanish vocabulary separate in my head. I found it a lot easier than German when I studied that 5 years later.
Italian, on the other hand, was not something I was able to pick up, despite spending 6 months in Sicily. Granted, I didn’t have any classes or formal training, but I expected that knowing 2 other romance languages would have been helpful. Not so much.
Written Spanish is a lot easier to learn than in many other languages, because it looks more like it’s spoken more than most languages do. And that helps your general language learning.
There are also tons of resources available for learning Spanish, which makes it easier. A few years ago I made an attempt to learn Bengali as a foreign language and gave up without knowing a word. The only resources for beginners’ Bengali I could find were absolutely fucking terrible; the audiotapes were entirely in Bengali, which meant I just switched it on and listened for a bit without having a clue what they were trying to teach me. Perhaps they believed in learning by osmosis.
Spanish learners have a hell of a lot more than that to help them.
I was stationed in Okinawa for 3 years and I was able to pick up enough through emersion that I could have actual conversations with patient strangers. I wanted to learn, so I would watch American TV that had been dubbed with Japanese. I’d talk to anyone who would talk back. The big problem there was that they usually wanted to practice their English while I wanted to practice my Japanese. I never learned to read Kanji, but I could recognize important-to-me symbols.
I wouldn’t say that I became fluent during those 3 years, but I could do more than just order food or tell a taxi driver where I wanted to go. I haven’t used it in years, but I can still understand Japanese when I hear it spoken.
For the longest time, I had an attitude problem about learning Spanish. As a retail worker I highly resented it when people would come to the store and demand that we speak a foreign language, so I deliberately refused to learn. Yeah, I was young and dumb.
I started learning Latin as a hobby a few years ago. Not because I thought that I’d run across a lot of Latin speakers, but because I love etymology. Somehow, somewhere along the course of my studies and local exposure…I’ve picked up a lot of Spanish.
I know that young brains pick up different languages faster than old ones. I was 18 when I learned Japanese and while it wasn’t what I’d call easy, it was doable. I started studying Latin at 34 and its not as hard as I thought it would be. Spanish just kinda crept in there due to exposure.
I took two years of Spanish in high school. They didn’t offer 3rd year, so I switched to French, took two years AND spent a summer studying it in France. When I took my college placement tests, I scored an entire semester higher in Spanish.
YMMV.