Is Spanish difficult to learn?

Is Spanish difficult or easy to learn?

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How hard is Spanish to learn? Is it a question you’re asking yourself?

Let me tell you this: there are no ‘difficult’ or ‘easy’ languages to learn. Everything is relative.

Whether or not you perceive a language to be ‘difficult’ or ‘easy’ will depend on a number of factors, including:

your native language (the language you’re learning may, for example, share a lot of vocabulary with your native language, which will make it more straightforward to learn)
whether you’ve learned any other foreign languages before (for example, if you already know some French, you may find it easier to learn Spanish than someone who hasn’t learned French before, because the two languages have a lot of things in common)

Is Spanish easy?

You can watch my video to find out! If you’d rather read about this topic then carry on reading!

There are a few things that will make Spanish relatively easy for you, especially when you already speak English (and I assume you do since you’re reading this post!).

Spanish and English share a lot of vocabulary. Just google ‘Spanish English cognates’ and you will be presented with lists of words that are the same in both languages.

Pronunciation is quite straightforward – most letters in Spanish are pronounced how they’re written.

Another fairly easy aspect of Spanish are the tenses and sentence structure – they are quite similar to English. For example, the present continuous tense uses very similar forms in both languages. In English, you say ‘I am dancing’ and in Spanish ‘estoy bailando’ (‘estoy’ being the present tense singular form of ‘to be’ – ‘I am’ in English – and ‘bailando’ being the gerund form of the verb ‘bailar’ – ‘dancing’ in English being the gerund of ‘to dance’).

If you’ve never learned a foreign language before, the explanation above may not make too much sense… But once you’ve started learning, you will get to grips with this very quickly and you will see what I mean!

Spanish can be quite hard too

There are a few things, though, that may make Spanish relatively difficult to learn.

For example, there are some sounds in Spanish that don’t exist in English. Like the ‘Z’, the double ‘L’, the ‘J’. They can be quite tricky but once you’ve learned the rules and practised the sounds consistently, you will get good at pronouncing them!

Another possible difficulty when learning Spanish is the fact that it has lots of different varieties. People in Spain speak with a different accent than people in Mexico, for example. And, on top of that, in each country there are numerous different accents as well.

Buy hey, which language doesn’t have that, right?

And the final one is the fact that Spanish speakers do speak quite quickly, compared to English speakers, for example. This can make it fairly difficult for non-native speakers at beginner and lower-intermediate levels to follow conversations. But, with practice, you will get better and better every day.

So, that’s it! Make sure you subscribe to my YouTube channel for more language learning advice!