For those that thought Spanish was/is difficult to learn...

[Santiago F]

1. Spanish is a phonetic language, things are pronounced the way they're spelled and spelled the way they sound, other than the silent h there are pretty much no exceptions. English on the other hand is not a phonetic language. If you listen to me speaking without already knowing the words I'm saying and how they're spelled, it's doubtful that you could even come close to accurately transcribing what I say.

Yes, I agree. When I said English was easier I was thinking of spoken English, at least grasping the basics.

2. Related to the first point, english has a ton of homophones, many many more than spanish. Also homographs and homonyms which are not found in spanish.

Yes, sure, but in my own experience as a student of English as a foreign language, homographs , homophones, and homonyms are only a nuisance at an intermediate or advanced stage of learning, not at the beginning.

For example

1 So
2 Sew
3 Sow
4 Sow
5 Sough

1, 2 & 3 are pronounced the same but spelled differently, same with 4 & 5. 3 & 4 are spelled identically but pronounced completely differently. All 5 have completely different definitions.

Yes, I agree. Well, of course English has its difficulties when learning it, but still I think on the whole it is easier... (though I'm starting to consider the opposite possibility)

3. Vocabulary is much easier. A huge amount of words - outside of day to day mundane, i'd wager over 85% -, in spanish have cognates in english. The reverse is not true.

Well, yes, you only start to realize that when you are an intermediate or advanced speaker of English as a foreign language. When I teach my local students some cognate words that are more formal, literary, or technical which have another more "colloquial" equivalent... they are surprised. I mean, word pairs like "deep - profound", "building - edifice", "explain - explicate", "recover - recuperate", "feeling - sentiment", "trust - confide", "write down - annotate"... ans so on.

"'Sentiment', haha, you made it up, that's not English", they say...

In fact, we can "show off" to native English speakers (who don't know Spanish) by using all those "refined" words like "profound" or "sentiment", because for us they resemble our more "plain" words "profundo" and "sentimiento".

Anyway, from our point of view, English is -outside the other Romance languages- the most closely related language to Spanish as regards vocabulary. So, even if there may be 85% of those Spanish words you mention which have cognates in English, in the reverse direction it may be 50% (I don't know, just to say an approximate number).

For example, grabbing a random book off of the bookshelf and opening it to a random page, the first sentence on the page is:

"El ritmo de los tambores se incrementó en velocidad y complejidad."

Now admittedly I landed on a sentence that illustrated my point very well, and they're not all like that but for the most part you can get a pretty good idea of whats going on by drawing on your english vocabulary.

Well, yes. The same holds true for Spanish speakers but only when the English texts are more technical/literary/formal.

I think it comes down to the fact that spanish is a language mostly based in latin, and english has cognates for most latin derived words, where as english is a language with roots in norse languages, germanic languages as well as latin languages, with the former roots not having cognates in spanish.

That's true. Still, there are some cognates in Spanish coming from Germanic languages. Don't forget that some Germanic peoples lived in the Iberian Peninsula for a long time. So, the words "guerra - war", "franco - frank", "robar - rob", "boat - bote", "blanco - blank", "brecha - breach", "brisa - breeze", "fresco - fresh", and so on. Yes, they are fewer than the Latin cognates, for sure, but still there exist many as you can see.

A brief example. While we may say Sun for sol, sol is easily understood through the context of solarium, solar, etc etc. We say sleep for dormir, but again its not difficult to see the relationship to dormant, dormitory, dormient,etc. Hard for duro, but durable, durometer? Its just seems like it's so much easier for us...

4. As joe blow said, Spanish conjugation is more straight forward than that of English (more cut and clear rules), and spanish has much fewer phrasal verbs.

Agree on the phrasal verbs, but I don't agree at all in the "easier" conjugation. English verbs are far easier to conjugate than Spanish. You don't have so many inflections. Basically all the persons are the same, varying only in 2 morphological tenses (present and past). The rest can be constructed via auxiliaries and non-inflected verb forms. This is something that any beginner learner of English will tell the teacher when he/she is learning English: that the verbs are much easier than in Spanish.

Of course, these are all just my impressions. As I will never be a native spanish speaker learning english, I guess I'll never know for sure.

Ditto, the other way around.

 

[ReemsterCARP]

I'd say that if you find it hard to learn Spanish (as a Westerner), you're probably not that good at learning languages in general.

 

[JoeBlow]

4. As joe blow said, Spanish conjugation is more straight forward than that of English (more cut and clear rules), and spanish has much fewer phrasal verbs.

Joeblow didn't say that!