Is Spanish hard to learn? If your first language is English, the simplest answer is “not really.”
The reality is much more complicated than that, though.
In this post, I’ll break down the factors that make Spanish easy to learn, the ones that make it difficult to learn and how to speak Spanish fluently if it’s not your first language.
Once you’re done reading, I hope you have all the information you need to decide whether you should pursue your Spanish studies or not.
Spanish is actually one of the easiest languages to learn for English speakers. According to the U.S. government’s School of Language Studies (SLS), Spanish is a Category I language, meaning it only takes up to 30 weeks or 750 class hours to learn. (Note that class hours are separate from individual study hours, though.)
Here are the reasons why studying Spanish is relatively easy if your native language is English.
English and Spanish share many words that look similar and have the same definitions, such as adoptar (to adopt) and participar (to participate). These are called English-Spanish cognates, and they make Spanish easier to learn because they allow you to build vocabulary more easily than if these cognates weren’t present.
On the other hand, it’s also important to note that false cognates exist as well. These are words that seem similar but have different meanings—like sopa, which actually means “soup” rather than “soap.”
Spanish and English have very similar sentence structures. Except for a few differences (like the adjective order, for instance), Spanish and English both use the “Subject, Verb, Object” (SVO) sentence structure. That means you don’t have to spend as much time grappling with grammar rules and such, because they’re more or less familiar to you already.
For example, conjugating a verb or building a sentence are both fairly uniform throughout the language (with a few exceptions, of course).
Further, nouns ending in -o are often masculine, while nouns that end in -a are often feminine. Even the exceptions to this have patterns: nouns that end with -ema are nearly always masculine—e.g., el poema (the poem) and el tema (the theme).
The more alert you are to these patterns and how they occur, the faster you’ll become fluent in Spanish.
Now, let’s get into the reasons why the answer to “is Spanish hard to learn” might be “yes” for native English speakers.
The bad news is that many of the most common verbs in Spanish are irregular. You’ll have to master these irregular verbs in order to hold fluent conversations in Spanish.
The good news is that, as we’ve mentioned earlier, there are also consistent patterns in how these verbs are conjugated depending on their corresponding subject pronoun. So don’t feel intimidated if they look different from regular verbs at first—while irregular verbs have their own conjugation rules, those rules are almost as consistent as those for their regular cousins.
Unlike English, Spanish nouns have assigned genders.
These genders are often attached with no rhyme or reason. In many cases, you’re simply expected to remember if a word is masculine or feminine. And you can’t ignore gender, because the gender of a noun affects the words around it like adjectives and articles.
Although they often seem random, there are some rules surrounding genders, too. As you learn, you’ll start to get a sense of why things are certain genders throughout the language. For example, a group of mixed gender people will always be referred to in a masculine way, while many animal nouns can be either male or female, depending on the animal’s actual gender.
Most of the letters in Spanish are identical to those of the English alphabet. However, Spanish pronunciation differs significantly from English, even if the letters it uses are the same.
You should be especially careful with vowels, which use different pronunciations from their English equivalents. On the other hand, unlike English vowels, Spanish vowels are usually pronounced the same no matter what. For example, the letter e is pronounced with an “eh” sound, like in “met.”
But nailing those sounds can be challenging for non-native speakers. And don’t get me started on the notorious rolled rr sound!
If you want to learn more about what makes Spanish easy or difficult to learn, watch this video by the polyglot Olly Richards:
And finally, just keep learning!
The best way to make learning Spanish easier is to believe that you can do it. Just keep working toward your fluency goals and go for the gold!
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Other sites use scripted content. FluentU uses a natural approach that helps you ease into the Spanish language and culture over time. You’ll learn Spanish as it’s actually spoken by real people.
FluentU has a wide variety of videos, as you can see here:
FluentU brings native videos within reach with interactive transcripts. You can tap on any word to look it up instantly. Every definition has examples that have been written to help you understand how the word is used. If you see an interesting word you don’t know, you can add it to a vocab list.
Review a complete interactive transcript under the Dialogue tab, and find words and phrases listed under Vocab.
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