Planning to start learning Spanish? We have great news for you: this language is much easier to study for the people who already speak English than for the ones who don’t. You can reach fluency within half a year of intensive studying in the closest languages to English. Usually, these are the languages from Romance languages classification. Spanish is one of them.
It depends on you in the end how hard Spanish is: if you already know basic phrases and words in Spanish, it will be easier to overcome the communicative barrier, comparing to the people who know nothing about the language. Let’s take a look at the core similarities between English and Spanish that might help you with the studying process.
English Speakers Know Many Spanish Words
Speaking English is hard for you? Sure, it’s not difficult when you’ve been using these words for years. There are so many similarities to English words in Spanish that when you start learning the language you already know lots of them. The list of examples is endless: “hotel” means hotel and is spelled the same in Spanish, “idea” is the idea.
Words that sound familiar and spell familiar are called cognates. They help English speakers a lot in the way to Spanish fluency. Although, there is the other side of the coin – false cognates. These are the words that look and sound like words from the other language but have a different meaning. For example, “exito” means “success” in Spanish, but not exit. Recognizing these familiar words is just the beginning; engaging in online Spanish lessons can further accelerate comprehension and fluency, providing a structured path to mastering the language.You can ask your Spanish tutor to explain to you all the details on false cognates, so you know them by heart and don’t make uncomfortable mistakes.
Spanish Has Similar Sentence Structure
Sentence structure is one more thing that almost the same in Spanish and English. Spanish also uses the construct of subject, verb, and object in the sentence structure. This similarity makes it easier to remember the sentences. Knowing some Spanish words and how to make a sentence gives you a push in your Spanish learning.
One of the most difficult things about sentences in Spanish is that subject sometimes can be a part of the verb. It happens because of conjunctions which allow skipping the subject. It is harder for English speakers but easier for the Russians or French.
There Are Lots of Rules in Spanish
Spanish is the language of rules, and English is similar to that. The more rules, the more exceptions, like we all know. It is good that the language has all these lists of exceptions because the more you know about them, the better it is for your fluency.
Learning Spanish, you will often see these patterns they work with the conjunctions and the ending of the words, sentence structure, and word allocation. No wonder that Spanish is number four in the list of most spoken languages all over the world. Patterns help us memorize the language structure and work better with it, so learning them is crucial on the way to fluency.
Regular and Irregular Verbs
English is the language where verbs can be presented in two forms: regular and irregular. Spanish is the same: it has the patterns where regular verbs change according to the one rule, but irregular verbs are exceptions and do not follow that rule.
Communicating effectively in Spanish requires knowing these verbs, which is quite a long list of irregular verbs to learn by heart. There are many more rules on the verbs in Spanish, but knowing the list of irregular verbs is a must that gets you to the next level in Spanish.
Bottom Line
There are limitless possibilities to study Spanish now: Internet, books, movies, and so on. The similarities between the languages also help a lot in learning Spanish, that is why more and more people prefer studying this language every year. There is a sole thing that you can’t borrow from anywhere when learning Spanish – practice and patience.
Patience is everything in learning any language, and practice is the way to success. Follow our pieces of advice to get the most out of Spanish learning, and never give up on memorizing irregular verbs!
