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How hard can learning Spanish be?

You might wonder why would one learn Spanish ? Well, because it’s one of the most used languages in the World, especially in the business sector and not only, and also, because most of the Spanish locals don’t speak English and it can become pretty hard to find what you need when nobody can communicate with you. Of course, the young generation is speaking English, but again, most of them are gone for studies in another countries and most of the beautiful beaches and parts of Spain are not in the big cities, but in small towns, where only the old ones stay.

Compared to languages like Russian or Arabic for example, learning Spanish can be easy, but it still takes time, patience and practice in order to learn it because of its verb conjugations or  the subjunctive and usted vs. tú, to name a few. It’s still though to say how hard or easy it is to learn Spanish, because it depends on each and every person, on their mother tongue and on the other languages that he/she is speaking.

Here are the easy side of learning Spanish:

• It has many cognates(words that are the same, or almost the same in more languages) with English
• You pronounce the Spanish words in the same way they are written, unlike English for example
• It’s easy to form plurals : you usually add –s or –es to the end of a noun. There are of course a few rules used for specific nouns which end in –ion or –z and other rules depending on the gender of the word.
• Adverbs are a breeze
• Past tense doesn’t require helping verbs
• Spanish locals are always happy to help you learn their language
• There are many free apps and tools, some of them even for free, which can help you learn the written part at least

You might wonder which are the difficult parts in this deal? Here you go:

• Spanish is a very fast spoken language, which means that sometimes you might get lost when you hear a Spanish speaker talking, but you get used to it in time.
• Accents, new letters and the upside-down punctuation.
• There are a lot of “you” in the Spanish language, like there is “the” in English
• Spanish language can get very different from a region of the country to another so sometimes you might not be able to understand anything.
• Regional accents are also very hard to understand

How to stay motivated?

Just think about the nice weather Spain hosts and all the beautiful beaches and cities there are. Why would you miss all these if you truly love them, just because of a language barrier? Go ahead and learn it, you can do it!