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Why is Spanish singled out as easy lang? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| benzionisrael Triglot Groupie Spain Joined 4656 days ago 79 posts - 142 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese, SpanishB2 | Message 17 of 55 25 April 2012 at 10:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
Spanish seems to be viewed that way in North America. However, I am in Europe. I don´t think the same conception normally exists on a large scale here in Europe. They were just one off ocassions. I had a friend of Turkish origen but brought up in the UK after his mother left his womanizing dad and came back to her home country. Because of that situation he hadn´t acquired the Turkish language when he was a kid and so he felt obligated to learn it as an adult. However, he hated it. He openly hated it and had a lot of trouble learning it. He also knew that I was into languages and that my Spanish learning was going well. Jelous that I was becoming proficient in a foreign language whereas he was still monolingual and frustrated with his Turkish learning, he constantly told me that I can only speak Spanish because it is the "easy language". He also labeled Turkish as another "easy, ugly and barbaric" language, and blamed his lack of progress on his lack of motivation. Strangely enough he viewed languages he respected like French, German and English as "insanely complex and difficult, highly sophisticated, cultured" languages. It seems that he would immediately label any language he didn´t like as easy. Normally in the UK and most of Europe however, Spanish is seen as a useful and elegant language, and learning Spanish is even seen as something positive in the UK when language learning is not often valued. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Taps Diglot Newbie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4831 days ago 15 posts - 22 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 18 of 55 25 April 2012 at 10:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thank you. I'm in Spain right now and yes, I do feel that getting to a basic or conversational level of Spanish is easier than doing so with other languages, perfecting it and speaking it fluently are extremely hard. I've been living in Spain for almost 4 months and I still oftentimes have no idea what some Spaniards are saying. They speak very quickly and it takes a lot of getting used to. Furthermore, while I can say what I want to say in Spanish and express myself well enough, I doubt I sound like a native speaker, which in my eyes is the ultimate goal. Edited by Taps on 25 April 2012 at 10:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5121 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 19 of 55 26 April 2012 at 2:12am | IP Logged | |||||
A generation ago (my generation), I would probably have agreed with you. While most kids took French, I ended up taking Spanish, much for the same reason. I didn't want to do what everyone else was doing. These days, at least with my nieces and nephews, Spanish is a lot more common to study. In Northern Minnesota and Wisconsin (where most of my relatives are), Spanish is now encouraged over any other foreign language being taught in high school, which are French, Spanish and German, at best. R. == Edited by hrhenry on 26 April 2012 at 2:14am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Camundonguinho Triglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4740 days ago 273 posts - 500 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Spanish Studies: Swedish | Message 20 of 55 28 April 2012 at 10:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Spanish is difficult because there is no single universal variant. It's uniform only in the most formal register (but this variety is not used much in daily life). There are just too many things that sound weird or unnatural in Spain, but are perfectly fine in Argentina, or in Mexico or in Cuba. The English language is becoming more and more unified (because of Hollywood and popular music), the Portuguese language too because of the Brazilian influence, but in the case of Spanish...Differences are getting bigger and bigger. If you want to speak Spanish fluently, you have the embrace the colloquial Spanish. But, watching soap operas from Spain, Mexico and Argentina...I can clearly hear the differences, and they are huge. Not in the sense of ''getting the meaning'', but in the sense of ''sounding natural/native''. So, sooner or later, you have to specialize: Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina...You have to focus on one variant only and stick with it. Otherwise people will always correct your Spanish. ;) in Spain, many people won't even understand you if you speak like an Argentinian, they don't know that NAFTA is gas/petrol and that COLECTIVO is a bus ;) or that PARO means a strike and not unemployment, and FRUTILLA is not a small fruit, but a strawberry ;) If you use LABURAR with Spaniards they will say ''stop using lunfardo'', but at the same time, they use their local slang words (like CURRAR; the Castillian words for LABURAR; or MOLAR = to be enjoyable/cool) and they don't even consider them slangy ;)
There are grammatical differences as well: Llámame nada más llegar a casa (Spain) = Llamame apenas llegues a casa (Argentina) Call me as soon as you arrive/come home. Edited by Camundonguinho on 28 April 2012 at 10:41pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4940 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 21 of 55 29 April 2012 at 12:14am | IP Logged | |||||
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I've said this many times before. There are three things which in my opinion make a language hard or simple for an individual. Those are in percentages:
1. Language relation to one's own native tongue (25%) 2. Grammatical learning curve frontloaded vs backloaded (35%) 3. Personal motivation (40%) Personal motivation makes or brakes how one perceives a language. If you are interested and passionate, you will find almost any language easy, because the learning process will be a rewarding experience and not a frustration. Point 1 is the most obvious that beginners consider. To me it is point two that is the most overlooked and has a major influence and how languages are perceived on the difficulty scale. I always come back to my example of German vs Spanish. German is a frontloaded language grammatically, Spanish is a backloaded one. To achieve simple fluency in German, you MUST achieve working proficiency in three genders X four cases (12 possible definite/indefininte article combinations), a dozen ways to form plurality, a quirky word order compared to other western European languages, a fairly complex system of assigning case to prepositions, relative pronons, prepositional verbs, and have no choice but to know by heart the gender of nouns or else the whole rest of the case system brakes down and will not be understood. Add to that some quirks like weak nouns. All those things you must learn as a beginner-intermediate student. To achieve the same capability in Spanish, there are only two genders with a very predictable way of determining gender of noun (o/a), no cases and thus no shifty article changes, no need for prepositional assignment of cases, a very predictable word order, and the simplest plural formation of any western European language (always -s). In terms of verbs, you only need proficiency in the present tense, imperfect, and preterite. If you want to reach advanced level in German, you have to learn basically nothing extra beyond the above, just more vocabulary and proper use of the subjunctives for conditionals and indirect speech and writing. To achieve advanced levels in Spanish, you need to learn the future tense, the conditional and past conditional, the present perfect and how to use it properly which is very tricky, the pluperfect, perhaps even the elusive historical past (for refined writing). You must learn of course the subjunctives, which has a present, imperfect, a 2nd form in the past, and compound tenses. Spanish have far greater verb irregularity (radical changing spelling verbs), than either Portuguese or Italian, and more than French, which you need to memorize. Since most people only study beginner levels in languages (and either quit or are satisfied with basic fluency), most people, I would say 4 in 5 language learners, never get to advanced concepts. So between German and Spanish, 4 in 5 based on the above will see Spanish as far more accessible. 14 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| ofdw Diglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5846 days ago 39 posts - 47 votes Speaks: English*, Italian | Message 22 of 55 29 April 2012 at 1:38am | IP Logged | |||||
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"Spanish seems to be viewed that way in North America. However, I am in Europe. I don´t think the same conception normally exists on a large scale here in Europe. They were just one off ocassions. I had a friend of Turkish origen but brought up in the UK after his mother left his womanizing dad and came back to her home country. Because of that situation he hadn´t acquired the Turkish language when he was a kid and so he felt obligated to learn it as an adult. However, he hated it. He openly hated it and had a lot of trouble learning it. He also knew that I was into languages and that my Spanish learning was going well. Jelous that I was becoming proficient in a foreign language whereas he was still monolingual and frustrated with his Turkish learning, he constantly told me that I can only speak Spanish because it is the "easy language". He also labeled Turkish as another "easy, ugly and barbaric" language, and blamed his lack of progress on his lack of motivation. Strangely enough he viewed languages he respected like French, German and English as "insanely complex and difficult, highly sophisticated, cultured" languages. It seems that he would immediately label any language he didn´t like as easy. Normally in the UK and most of Europe however, Spanish is seen as a useful and elegant language, and learning Spanish is even seen as something positive in the UK when language learning is not often valued. [/QUOTE] " Yes, I would second this. Here in the UK Spanish is just as highly respected as any other European language. It is also often stated that Spanish is, if not easy, at least easier to begin learning than many other languages, and the reasons for this are fairly clear: it has consistent pronunciation and stress, and the inflections a learner needs for a reasonable level of communication are relatively few compared with most other languages. In these respects it scores higher for ease of learning than its Romance neighbours, while the vocabulary crossover is about the same. That doesn't of course make it an easier language to perfect, as other posters have quite rightly pointed out, but I don't think it is unreasonable to consider it relatively easy to achieve basic communication skills. Edited by ofdw on 29 April 2012 at 1:38am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ofdw Diglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5846 days ago 39 posts - 47 votes Speaks: English*, Italian | Message 23 of 55 29 April 2012 at 1:39am | IP Logged | |||||
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Apologies - something went wrong with the quoting there!
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5047 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 24 of 55 29 April 2012 at 10:47am | IP Logged | |||||
I think that differences in pronunciation is what strikes a foreign learner. When you hear "peyó", you cannot always understand that it is "pedido". 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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