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If I hear "Spanish is easy" ONE more time | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5452 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 81 of 137 03 June 2010 at 10:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
Of course. I completely agree. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5923 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 82 of 137 04 June 2010 at 12:38am | IP Logged | |||||
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I no longer like the idea of trying to classify languages based on whether or not they may be easy or difficult. Yes, I know that Japanese or Georgian will most likely be more difficult for speakers of Indo-European languages to learn, but I believe there are things about every language that could be challenging for non-native learners.
Spanish is supposed to very easy for me to learn since my first language is English, and sometimes it is. There are some words and phrases I already knew such as "hola", "mañana", "hombre", "tortilla", "burrito", "¿que pasa?", "comprender", "chau", "adiós", "perro", "buenas días" etc, so I didn't have to learn these when I started my self-study of Spanish, but in the intermediate level of study the vocabularies begin to differ a little more, though this isn't a concern for me as I enjoy learning new words. People often say that Spanish orthography is very simple and compared to languages like English, French and Danish it is; however I sometimes forget the accent marks and write or type "que" or "este" when I actually mean "qué" or "esté". I think if I focus a little more on the relationship between spelling and pronunciation these minor issues will sort themselves out, but it does slightly contradict my claim of being good at spelling. The verb conjugation patterns are simple so long as I ignore the irregular and stem-changing verbs, unfortunately many of the irregular or stem changing verbs are quite common and their conjugations must be memorized and then encountered over and over in the written and spoken language. To give just one example, I used to avoid the verbs "poder" and "pedir" because I confused the conjugated forms so often that I forgot the actual meaning of the two verbs, but I am confident this minor issue will be solved by more reading, listening and speaking. Everyone who knows, or thinks they know, much about Spanish seems to complain about the subjunctive mood. While I admit I can't always figure what exactly the subjunctive forms of a verb means; the verb tense that I've had more problems with was actually pretérito, because in this tense some stem-changing verbs suddenly use the infinitive stem again, and more frustratingly a few of the verbs change meanings in this tense. The compound tenses are also somewhat of a challenge, but that's only because I need to study them more. I haven't written much about pronunciation so far, since I don't have any great problems with Spanish pronunciation, although I am certain that I still sound like a "gringo" when I attempt to speak Spanish. I do know that the rolled 'r' is often difficult for English speakers to pronounce, as is the letter "j" since it's guttural "h" sound can sound mysteriously similar to the Dutch "g" and "ch" sounds. Finally, I do struggle occasionally with word order given that there seem to be so many options in Spanish sentences. Learning the different ways to form sentences and then coming up with statements that sound normal may be my biggest challenge, but I expect foreign languages to be different so sorting out Spanish syntax is actually fun for me; though I'll probably need to buy one the intermediate grammars already mentioned in this thread soon. EDIT: I corrected a few typos and other mistakes. Edited by mick33 on 04 June 2010 at 8:54am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 arashikat Diglot Pro Member United States Joined 4676 days ago 53 posts - 80 votes Speaks: Tagalog*, English Studies: Korean Personal Language Map | Message 83 of 137 21 July 2012 at 9:38am | IP Logged | |||||
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I heard that Spanish is easy, but having read the response in this thread, I take it that it really isn't (at least beyond the intermediate point).
I'm learning the language not for its reputed easiness or for its beauty, but to be competitive in the Californian job market--I see "Spanish speaking preferred" at least 6/10 times in job ads nowadays. Apparently, I personally have two distinct advantages: 1. I live in Los Angeles -- lots of great Spanish-speaking folks I can talk to. 2. I speak Tagalog and understand Cebuano -- The dredges of Spanish vocab in my native tongue will now be put to good use. Edited by arashikat on 21 July 2012 at 9:38am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Dagane Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4510 days ago 259 posts - 324 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishB2, Galician Studies: German Studies: Czech | Message 84 of 137 21 July 2012 at 12:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Well, I'm Spanish and the idea among Spaniards is that our language is very difficult to master for foreigners. I suspect it has got much of pride, though.
Nevertheless, I think there are two things which are really difficult for someone who want to get over simple sentences such as "Hola, ¿qué tal estás?" - The first one is grammar. Verbs have got more tenses than French, a language which I used to study at school, and there are more ones which are commonly used. An example is the widely used subjunctive. But don't worry, there're many people who don't even know how to use some of the tenses... By the way, there're other grammar aspects which are difficult. For instance, there are a lot of changes among the different parts of the sentence and droppings of subjects, prepositions and the like. Read poetry, you'll see ;). - The second one is vocab. As English, Spanish is widely spoken, so each region has got its own vocab. I enjoy reading good Latin-America Spanish literature, and sometimes there are several words per page I don't understand. Other times the problem is that the words are arcaisms or extremely cult... So yes, Spaniards use some vocab informally, but there are a wide range of it, actually. Anyway, I think the difficulty is something too subjective to be properly quantify. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Gala Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4549 days ago 229 posts - 421 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 85 of 137 21 July 2012 at 7:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
There's a long active thread with this topic in the español sub-forum, and what struck me most about all of the posts of those who claimed Spanish was easy was how bad their written command of it was. As far as Spanish vs. French, I took 2 semesters of French last year (as supporting electives for my Spanish major,) and I found them much easier than my first 2 semesters of Spanish. Of course, the latter is my 2nd language while the former was my 3rd, so having already learned how to learn one is surely a factor in that, as well as the fact that they're both in the Romance family. I've put French aside (for now), not because it was difficult, but because it was messing up my spelling in Spanish, and I still have to take an advanced Spanish composition course before I graduate. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5782 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 86 of 137 22 July 2012 at 4:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't agree: I like studying grammar, I find it fascinating; but I have yet to find an explanation that gives me the ability to choose 100% correctly in these cases and others.I'll leave out por v para (because I haven't studied it in much depth yet) but with ser v estar, imperfect v preterite and subjunctive v indicative I have studied whole books devoted to these topics, in addition to intermediate and advanced Spanish grammar books, research articles by linguists and professional articles by ELE teachers etc; and though I have found much that has helped me a lot, I have nowhere found anything that works 100% of the time. I find the articles by ELE teachers (written for each other) particularly interesting as these are native speakers who are specialised in teaching the language, and even they can't agree amongst themselves what rules govern these choices! Contrast that situation with the Germanic languages. Now, my German is much worse than my Spanish (I'm not saying my Spanish is that great) but I have yet to find any great mysteries in German. Sure, there's a lot to learn; but you can always know whether you have made the right choice by consulting a book (whereas with Spanish you sometimes have no choice but to find a native speaker and ask them, no matter how extensive your library might be!). There's nothing in German that can't be explained. Actually, that's not quite true. There's lots in German (as in any other language) that can't adequately be explained, but it's just that the underlying logic (whatever it is) operates in English too- so for English speakers it doesn't need a 100% watertight explanation, just a bit of guidance (for instance separable verbs). If you think separable verbs are easy to explain, try explaining to a Spanish speaker why it is that in English first you chop a tree down, then you chop it up (example from Joseph Keenan Breaking out of beginner's Spanish). Oh and the German case system is not difficult. I've heard that the Slavic case system is genuinely difficult but that's not so for German. From what I've seen so far the Modern Greek case system is not hard either. Spanish is easy? No way! Edit: ah wait, I see you wrote "a substantial fraction of the choices". I need to start reading things more carefully, my apologies. Yes, that's true, so I don't disagree after all. I'll let my post stand, though, because I think it makes some important points regarding the subject of this thread. Edited by Random review on 22 July 2012 at 9:03pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4520 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 87 of 137 22 July 2012 at 8:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
The FSI categorization is more about time to learn a language than the difficulty of the language. I don't find Icelandic easy, but I think it isn't more difficult than German. However, there are some points which take more time to learn than in German. 1) Weak verbs. Icelandic has three classes of weak verbs, one of them has umlaut. German doesn't divide the weak verbs into classes (at least not that I'm aware of). This means you have to learn more per verb in Icelandic than in German, which takes more time. 2) Noun classes. Icelandic has about 30 noun classes, German maybe 10. More declination patterns to learn takes more time. You could reduce Icelandic noun classes to 6-8 and just learn all others as irregular nouns, which might be a good idea depending on your learning preferences but doesn't really cut down the time to learn the language. 3) Perceived irregularities. Icelandic seems to have a lot of irregular words, though a lot of these irregularities can be tackled by knowledge of Icelandic language history. By applying language history knowledge, you could also shrink the noun classes considerably. But learning language history might take as much time as just learning all irregular words, so most don't bother. 4) Then there is the issue of spelling, number of vocals and pronunciation. Edited by daegga on 22 July 2012 at 8:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jappy58 Bilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member United States Joined 4637 days ago 200 posts - 413 votes Speaks: Spanish*, Guarani*, Arabic (Levantine), Arabic (Egyptian), Arabic (Maghribi), Arabic (Written), French, English, Persian, Quechua, Portuguese Studies: Modern Hebrew | Message 88 of 137 22 July 2012 at 8:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have also heard this comment many times before, and it comes mostly from either A) individuals who have no experience with Spanish or even any other languages or B) students who are just beginning Spanish.
As others have agreed, Spanish is indeed one of the most accessible languages for native English speakers - compared to Arabic and Persian, for example -, but it still requires plenty of work to get to C1 or solid C2 level. I know I'm a native speaker, so I shouldn't be commenting on a topic about learning Spanish, but I have met many Spanish students during my past 19 years in the U.S. as well. I'd put the number at about 40 individuals - of them, I only know about 20 well. After five years, only eight of them would be past the B2 stage, IMO, while the others know merely conversational Spanish or struggle very seriously when Spanish is used under "normal" circumstances (not for a class, outside the professional area, etc.). Another thing I've noticed that makes Spanish a little more challenging is being able to recognize different dialects. While Spanish is not dramatically different from one pole to the other, it is still quite diverse, and sometimes speech patterns make certain varieties difficult to comprehend for certain students - I've seen this a lot with Chilean and Cuban dialects, as well as European Spanish, for those who focused on Mexican Spanish (and vice versa). Reaching a C1 or higher in any language is challenging. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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