Why Spanish is harder than English?
If you have just begun learning Spanish (and particularly if you do not have prior experience with any languages other than your native tongue), you may find yourself asking…
Why is Spanish so hard?
Trust us, you are not alone in wondering this. Spanish can be an extremely challenging language for native speakers of English to learn from scratch. There are many reasons for this, which we will break down for you here.
Why is Spanish so difficult?
Spanish can be deceptively difficult. Many people falsely believe that they already know more Spanish than they really do. This can be because of the fact that many Spanish words are cognates, or words which sound the same in two or more languages. (Check out our list of Spanish cognates here. It’s the reason you can recognize many words when you hear someone speaking Spanish, even if you’ve never learned any before.
The big problem with this is that there are also a lot of FALSE cognates, meaning words which really seem like they should mean the same thing, but actually don’t. (Check out our list of the most confusing false cognates in Spanish). These tend to trip people up, making them believe that they know what they are saying when they are at best saying something incorrect… or at worst, saying something downright offensive or insulting.
Pronouns can make learning Spanish hard
There are more technical reasons why learning Spanish can be hard, as well. For example, some of the challenges are right at the core of how Spanish is structured, which can be profoundly different than in English. In other words, translating English to Spanish is not nearly as simple as just looking up each word in the English to Spanish dictionary and replacing it. The order that the words must be in may change. Also, Spanish makes more use of verb conjugations to determine meaning, instead of pronouns and compound verbs like you more commonly see in English. For an oversimplified example, check this out:
English: “I study Spanish.”
Spanish: “Estudio español.”
Notice that estudio means study, and español of course means Spanish. But where’s the “I”? Estudio is the form of estudiar that is conjugated for “yo/I.” So it already means “I study”. While it is technically correct to say “Yo estudio español”, which is literally “I study Spanish”, the “yo” seems redundant (since estudio already implies that it’s you). So, it’s typically just left out altogether. While it’s easy to comprehend with practice, this can be an extremely challenging concept for a beginner Spanish speaker to wrap their head around. To further complicate things, direct, indirect, and reflexive object pronouns are frequently placed before the verb, instead of after. For example, “I wash myself” versus “me lavo”.
Tenses can make Spanish tough to learn
The imperfect tense also trips up a lot of novice Spanish speakers, and is another main reason why Spanish is so hard to learn. A whole book could be written on what the imperfect tense is and why it’s so foreign to English speakers, but the gist of it is that is used to talk about past conditions, past habitual actions, or to describe what a person was doing before they were interrupted by another thing. Subjunctive, or subjuntivo is similar. The subjunctive can be employed to demonstrate desires, doubts, the unknown, the abstract, and emotions. There really is no easy comparable example in English, so it can certainly be a challenge.
The gender of nouns can make learning Spanish tricky
The fact that items are associated with a gender in Spanish can also be tricky for newbies. For example, “el libro” means that the book is technically considered a male item, whereas “la biblioteca” means that the library is technically considered female. Meanwhile, with things like professions it can obviously go either way (ie. el doctora for a male doctor or la doctora for a female doctor.) Regardless, the use of “el” vs. “la” when paired with gendered nouns is highly regular, albeit with some exceptions (for example, although “agua” ends in a, it is still “el agua”, mostly because “la agua” is quite a tongue twister).
Irregular verbs can make Spanish challenging
A lot of verbs in Spanish follow a simple set of rules that make them easy to conjugate and thus easy to learn. For example, for any regular verb, taking off the “ar” at the end and adding an “o” is the conjugation for the present tense of “yo” (I).
Example: Caminar is walk, so I walk is “Camino”.
Others are not so simple, even in the most basic present tense.
Example: “Ir” means “go”, but “I go” would be conjugated “voy” and “you go” would be conjugated “vas” (don’t even get us started on “you went”, which is “fuiste”).
Fast Spanish speakers make Spanish hard
The fact that native Spanish speakers in many cultures are accustomed to speaking so quickly can make it challenging to pick out individual words. This isn’t just perception, either: studies have shown that Spanish speakers average 7.82 syllables per second, compared to just 6.19 syllables per second for English speakers. This can make it difficult to learn Spanish from Spanish movies, news broadcasts, radio programs, podcasts, etc.
Colloquialisms can make Spanish difficult to master
While this is true of pretty much any modern language, it’s worth mentioning. Local colloquialisms, or common sayings, can be extremely different depending on the country or even city in which you learn. Obviously, accents and dialects play into this. Obviously, the Spanish that you hear when traveling in Argentina is going to be quite different from what you hear when traversing Spain. However, this challenge is much more than just local slang or a localized accent. The way in which sentences are structured or the popular vocabulary used in a particular locale can be strikingly different. A perfect example is “vosotros” versus “ustedes”, which is roughly equivalent to “you guys” or the form “y‘all” commonly heard in the southern United States. Not only are the words different, but the entire conjugation of the verbs that follow changes drastically as well. This preference is highly regional (some American Spanish learners won’t even have any exposure to the subject pronoun “vosotros” unless they specifically have an instructor from Spain.)
Knowing where Spanish accents go can be hard
Despite the fact that Spanish words are generally easy to spell (because letters are always pronounced in a uniform way), accents can be tricky for English speakers to learn to use properly. In English, the written word does not really define where a syllable stress will falls; in fact, it can often seem quite arbitrary. Contrarily, Spanish has an intricate set of guidelines that govern how syllable stress works. In fact, they not only indicate stress, but also help differentiate between words with identical spellings, and more. If you’re not used to writing with accents, or tildes, it can be a difficult concept to grasp when first learning.
It can be difficult to roll your R’s in Spanish
This one is pretty self explanatory. If you’re not used to rolling your R’s because that sound simply doesn’t exist in your native language, you may have a hard time learning. It will take a bit of practice (although we’ve put together an article on how to roll your R’s if you’re a Spanish beginner that may help some.)
Spanish isn’t always hard
Despite all this, there are a couple of ways in which Spanish is much less complicated than English. For example: phonetically, it’s surprisingly simple. Letters are always pronounced the same way (why is read spelled the same but pronounced differently in “I read every day” and “I read that book last year”?) This means that there is much less ambiguity when reading Spanish words aloud. There aren’t silent letters (although there are still some hard to pronounce Spanish words!)
Maybe Spanish isn’t really that hard to learn at the end of the day, but it’s certainly a hard language to master. With Spanish, you can’t simply translate in your head and arbitrarily apply grammar rules. Understanding definitions and translations, as well as memorizing via rote practice can only get you so far. You have to truly develop an understanding and respect of the underlying rules which govern the Spanish language. Only by mastering these rules can you truly become an expert Spanish speaker. And that is why Spanish is so hard to learn.
Having difficulty learning Spanish doesn’t make you dumb OR mean that you can’t ever learn. You can overcome the roadblocks and master the Spanish language despite the potential barriers! Check out the best free Spanish audiobooks for beginners, or how to learn Spanish in your car.
