How great would it be to travel to Spain and interact with locals? Do you want to learn their language? Is Spanish easy to learn?
Is Spanish hard to learn? (spoiler alert- no, it’s not)
Now that you’ve made the decision to start learning a new language, Spanish is your top choice (a great choice, by the way). Now that you’ve made some headway, you’re thinking if learning Spanish is challenging.
The quick response is, “No! The Spanish language is accessible to everyone.
And now for my first piece of advice: have fun while learning a new language, no matter what it is you’re doing it for.
The good news is that you will learn Spanish and have a great time doing it. Of course, a few elements will determine how easily or quickly you learn it.
Let’s start by quickly reviewing the key factors that affect how someone learns and comprehends a new language:
- Predisposition: Everyone is aware that some people find learning a language easier than others. They possess that quality, such as a keen musical ear or a solid sense of orientation. However, even if that offers them an advantage, there are many other elements that affect how difficult a person perceives a language.
- Motivation: Regardless of whether you have a natural knack for languages, being extremely motivated can aid in your ability to learn new languages fast and effectively. Transfers to Spain in the near future, the possibility of a career abroad, or the idea of a romantic partner from Spain have always been fantastic motivators!
- How similar Spanish is to your native tongue: Spanish is a romance language, which implies that Latin is where its roots are. Learning Spanish could be very simple or a little more difficult depending on your first language.
Even yet, studying it is still far easier than learning a lot of other challenging foreign languages.
Learning Spanish will be incredibly simple if you are a native speaker of French, Portuguese, or Romanian or are fluent in one of these languages.
There are many words, grammar rules, and structural similarities between these languages. Even though learning Spanish might take a bit more time and work, you’ll be surprised at how simple it can be if you have the correct resources. Spanish is actually fairly similar to those languages.
What are the most difficult and easiest aspects of learning Spanish?
So, is learning Spanish challenging for English speakers?
We have excellent news: Spanish is among the simplest languages for English speakers to learn, according to the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). They even claim that basic fluency may be attained in as little as 24 weeks (or 600 hours).
So, after spending that much time learning the language, you ought to be able to carry on a basic conversation and participate in a variety of Spanish-language activities. They are only numbers in the end, and everyone learns differently and has different needs.
Having said that, let’s discuss the simplest and most challenging aspects of learning Spanish as well as strategies you can employ to get through any challenges you may encounter. Let’s start with the good news.
Most Spanish pronunciation guides focus solely on the language’s pronunciation rules. They frequently fall short of teaching you how to actually hear and pronounce said sounds.
At The Mimic Method, we believe that recognizing the location of a sound in word spelling is even more important than recognizing the location of a sound in word spelling.
By the end of this Spanish pronunciation guide, you should be familiar with the majority of the sounds associated with the Spanish alphabet in their phonetic form. You might even learn a few tricks to help you overcome problems like ‘rolling your R’s.’
In general, Spanish pronunciation is quite consistent. Once you know what sound each letter makes, you can tell how to pronounce a word by how it’s written (or a group of letters).
Spanish pronunciation is easy
The pronunciation is just one of the numerous factors that make Spanish a simple language to learn. You will be able to read a word you do not know and pronounce it correctly once you understand the Spanish alphabet and a few pronunciation guidelines, unlike English or French, which seem to have a random pronunciation.
You will quickly be able to say your first words and sentences if you practice speaking, listening, and reading. The modern Spanish alphabet contains 27 scripted letters. In modern Spanish,
however, there are at least 39 phonetic sounds. Even though English and Spanish have nearly identical alphabets, the same characters do not always represent the same sound in both languages.
The pronunciation of Spanish is concerned with the speech itself, which you will end up speaking if you want to truly learn the language.
The challenge will be to rewire your brain so that you can produce sounds for letters that aren’t familiar to you. Because these sounds are used for the same combination of letters – or syllables – when spelled at different places in words, there are more sounds than letters.
Spanish has two r sounds:
- Simple r like in pero (but) and caro (expensive)
- Rolled r like in perro (dog) and carro (car)
Learning how to pronounce the simple and rolled r sounds of Spanish is important because some Spanish words are identical except for the type of r they contain!
For example, the word pairs above (pero and perro) and (caro and carro) differ only in that the first word in each pair has a simple r, while the other has a rolled r. Continue reading to learn more about how to pronounce the Spanish r!
Simple ways for easily guessing the Spanish word
Spanish is the world’s second most spoken language, with 400 million native speakers (after Mandarin Chinese). Native Spanish speakers who learn the language naturally at a young age have it easy.
For the rest of us, learning Spanish entails a lot of studying vocabulary and memorizing verb conjugations. Here are some of the most difficult challenges for Spanish language learners.
Latin is the ancestor of all Romance languages, including Spanish, as previously stated. In reality, it is the tongue that is most similar to Latin.
Since the Middle Ages, many Latin words have been incorporated into everyday English. Many of the words you use every day in English have Latin roots, even if you aren’t aware of them.
As a result, these words are very similar to their Spanish counterparts. This means you can reverse the procedure and determine the Spanish word from an English word with Latin roots.
Why Spanish is a bit hard to learn
Like with any other foreign language, learning Spanish does have certain more challenging parts. The most important thing to remember is to not let yourself get overwhelmed; with a little research and practice, everything will be much simpler for you.
Having said that, the following are some factors that can make learning Spanish challenging for some learners and necessitate a little extra work.
Learning Spanish: where should you start?
It’s time to provide you with some fundamental strategies for learning Spanish fast, effortlessly, and amusingly now that we’ve cleared up the challenging components of the language.
Study the basic structure. You can start by enrolling in a Spanish course, reading a book, or using a variety of free online resources, but you should focus on and practice the fundamental Spanish grammatical structures right away.
Start with the fundamentals and continue to add features as you go. You can advance in complexity by starting with basic statements.
1. Learn basic conjugations
You should start working on the verb as soon as possible because it is the element that keeps the phrase together.
It’s true that Spanish conjugation may seem like a lot of work to a natural English speaker (who doesn’t have to deal with conjugations in his or her own language). However, you might start out slowly and concentrate on the most crucial things.
2. Don’t be shy and have fun with it
You must speak in order to practice speaking in order to learn a language. It’s time to get started if you’ve mastered the essential structure, learned 100 new vocabularies, and are at ease with auxiliaries and modal verbs.
What if you initially choose the incorrect verb or pronounce a word incorrectly? That is merely a stage of learning a language! So, let down your guard and strike up a conversation with the first Spanish you come across.
Additionally, learning a new language is analogous to piecing together a jigsaw in that it is a very rewarding cerebral exercise. The best thing is that you can “experiment” with so many different tools and forms of media.
The best method to remember vocabulary and grammar structures is to be exposed to the language as much as you can from the beginning by reading and listening to authentic content.
Best of all, you’re not even conscious that you’re learning! And don’t worry if you first only comprehend about 10% of what you’re reading or listening to.
Focus on the keywords, pay attention to the articles, examine the conjugations of the verbs, search for words that seem English-like, and then listen or watch for recently learned simple phrases. Similar to building with Legos, you keep adding various tiny bricks until the desired result is obtained.
Do you believe that Spanish is easy to learn?
Like any other foreign language, learning Spanish has certain more challenging parts. It can be challenging to recall and correctly combine articles and prepositions, and occasionally, Spanish misuses the subjunctive.
Spanish is not, however, more difficult to learn than German or French. Therefore, do not be afraid to learn this lovely language if you want to. Prior to beginning, make sure you locate the top online and offline resources and language classes.
Spanish is simple to learn!
