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

[lis2007_hotmail_com]

The difficulty in English is phonetics and in Spanish is the verbal system. German, I think, is in the first group. Netherlands, Norsk and Svenska are between German and English.
German is "redundant", prepositions, syntax and declinations to say the same. This language needs "accuracy", is the language of the philosophy like Greek.
I would add another factors to learn a language: the style and rythm of learning and the linguistic conditioning. Of course, adults and children learn in a different way.

 

[JoeBlow]

Hi Santiago, the problems for Spanish speakers (that I can tell you about) learning English are:

For beginnig students: auxiliary and modal verbs in questions, short answers and negation

Phonetcis, spelling.

Vocabulary, vocabulary vocabulry. THis includes phrasal verbs (of which there are thousands, but require simple memorization).

There are three problems for English speakers learning Spanish. Verb conjugations is not really one of them because, again, they require simple memorization. The three gray areas for English speakers are: ser vs estar; the imperfect; the subjunctive.

In conclusion, English and Spanish use verb tenses that are identical in most cases (not the imperfect, for example). I think both languages are relatively easy to learn for an Spanish or a English speaker. I'm sure Guarani or Russian are much harder, but I've never tried to study either of them

 

[Gringoboy]

Took me an age to learn subjunctive in Spanish, but it eventually clicked.
Like after a meal: Me alegro que les haya gustado.
And male and female too....la mano and el problema.
I was once pulled up in Spain quite severely for saying...lo he ponido (sounded good to me) where it should have been lo he puesto.
For me, much of it has been trial and error and it doesn't hurt to make mistakes as long as you are prepared to be corrected.

 

[joelie]

Hi Santiago, the problems for Spanish speakers (that I can tell you about) learning English are:

For beginnig students: auxiliary verbs in questions, short answers and negation

Phonetcis, spelling.

Vocabulary, vocabulary vocabulry. THis includes phrasal verbs (of which there are thousands, but require simple memorization).

There are three problems for English speakers learning Spanish. Verb conjugations is not really one of them because, again, they require simple memorization. The three gray areas for English speakers are: ser vs estar; the imperfect; the subjunctive.

In conclusion, English and Spanish use verb tenses that are identical in most cases (not the imperfect, for example). I think both languages are relatively easy to learn for an Spanish or a English speaker. I'm sure Guarani or Russian are much harder, but I've never tried to study either of them

One of my biggest problems in learning any language is that I first have to understand the English words that are being used to describe something! I finally understand well what 'the infinitive' means, but subjunctive or imperfect, or many of those other terms? No.

I have also not taken any classes, just tried to do some teach-yourself kinds of courses (that don't use all those complicated English words), and speaking with the people (with some tips from my husband). And I take a Spanish-English pocket dictionary with me. The first two times I pulled it out of my bag, a local would come over and ask me what word I wanted to know, which was pretty nice.

I also learnt a bit of Swahili once. While I never really tried hard, it is a really simple language to learn. I can't really tell you much about the technicalities of it, but it's pretty simple.

 

[JoeBlow]

I also learnt a bit of Swahili once. While I never really tried hard, it is a really simple language to learn

Sounds dubious

 

[PhilipDT]

Well, this is my opinion.

Now, I'm interested to know why you think English would be much harder to learn for Spanish speakers than the other way around. Just out of curiosity...

Cheers,

For me it comes down to a few things.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.


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.

 

[KatharineAnn]

This is an interesting topic...but I definitely think English is easier for Spanish speakers than the other way around. Hands down the most important factor for me is the overwhelming exposure to English, which English speakers do not get (in any language, for that matter). Ever wonder why English speakers seem to always be the worst at learning languages? (I am a native English speaker, love learning languages, and consider myself rather good at it, but as a general rule of thumb, I don't think it is our strong point compared to speakers of other languages). This is purely a question of exposure, as English speakers are those who are least exposed to ANY foreign language. So basically I think it is amount of exposure that is FAR more important than anything internally linguistic.

As far as language-specific factors go, I always thought that Spanish was easier to get a basic grasp on than English (due to reasons mentioned previously, such as vocabulary), but is harder to speak perfectly (or near perfectly). Why? Because I think the fact that English doesn't have genders makes it a LOT easier to not make the little, tiny mistakes that even the most fluent non-native Spanish speaker IS INEVITABLY going to make once in a while (maybe it's once a month, but it will happen!) Phrasal verbs are vocabulary, and require memorization, as does English's wide vocabulary and spelling.

Another factor, although this may not seem important to some, is that there are many, many more native Spanish dialects than English, in terms of different vocabulary, verb forms and tenses, pronunciation, and so forth. While the English language has US, UK, Australian, and South African English as the "main" native dialects (Canadian is almost identical to US, and New Zealand really is quite similar to Australian, all things considered), the Spanish language has got at least as many different truly different dialects as it does countries that speak it. In order to be truly fluent, meaning able to understand ALL dialects of the language, you must be very, very observant and learn a LOT more vocabulary. You also have to try to stick to one dialect in your ACTIVE vocabulary, because if you end up saying things like "vamos a coger el bondi en vez de ir en carro", you will not only sound ridiculous but also probably confuse more than one interlocutor

This sure is a fun thing to think about. I am currently studying Japanese and I don't think it's too far-fetched to consider you'd need about 3-4 times the studying/exposure/practice in order to become proficient...in a semester-long course you usually learn what you'd learn in a month of a romance language!

 

[PhilipDT]

blah blah blah

I just want to add that when I said learning English for a Spanish speaker was harder, I was not considering exposure. Because honestly that depends on a lot of things, where you live, what you do, etc.

 

[va2ba]

I don't really find Spanish to be that hard, its just a matter of how much you put into it and how quickly you can pick up the vocabulary.

However, I do think that Spanish is much easier for me to learn than say, Russian or Arabic. But that is just me.

 

[Hop]

While Spanish speakers have a great exposure to English via movies, TV, music, given the growing Latino population in the US, it's expected that living in the US, you have a basic knowledge of Spanish.

I've learned a lot about English in my short experience teaching it. I had never heard of phrasal verbs before! Also, consider the pronunciation of verbs in the past tense: talked, added, called. Seems easy enough because they all end in -ed, but they're pronounced: talkt, addid, calld. I had a student who added the audible -ed to each verb in the past and it made me cringe.