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Spanish: A wolf in sheep’s clothing | ||
Tags: Difficulty | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6053 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 41 of 73 11 June 2010 at 2:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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Spanish, it seems to me, gets difficult for Anglophones in the higher stages. Verbs, and also the way some normal Castilian words like coger become obscenities in Latin American Spanish. That is a minefield. However, like the other Romance languages, Spanish offers some huge advantages to Anglophones, like thousands of easily recognisable words.
From my personal experience, comparison with Turkish might be interesting. Little Turkish vocabulary is easily recognisable to a native English speaker on first exposure, and the syntax is so non-Indo-European that translating a long Turkish sentence into English can be like putting a jigsaw puzzle together, or trying to plug in a machine that has wires or fuses attached to it of spaghetti-like complexity. Spanish is simply not like that, neither are French or Italian. Edited by William Camden on 11 June 2010 at 2:42pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kidshomestunner Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6186 days ago 239 posts - 285 votes Speaks: Japanese | Message 42 of 73 11 June 2010 at 6:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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Pretty much a given that it's easy. Everyone from students to lecturers to Savory in the art of translation has told me that, and I think that this is enough to back up my own experience.
Yes, indeed it is easy. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6724 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 43 of 73 12 June 2010 at 12:08am | IP Logged | ||
Could it not be a simple oversight in MM? I've run into a couple of peculiarities in that dictionary before. As for language not being math, as an immigrant who came to the US at the age of 18 with perhaps high intermediate level in English, and then watched it evolve somehow without any further formal study towards a considerably more refined sense of meaning and usage, I am especially aware of the magic of language acquisition. However, the need for acquiring rather than learning a large part of any target language does not excuse every error or inaccuracy in a dictionary. Whether this is the case with populación in MM dictionary I cannot be certain, but the evidence I've seen so far suggests that it may be. Edited by frenkeld on 12 June 2010 at 12:15am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5126 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 44 of 73 12 June 2010 at 12:41am | IP Logged | ||
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That's true.
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| feanarosurion Senior Member Canada Joined 5062 days ago 217 posts - 316 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish, Norwegian | Message 45 of 73 12 June 2010 at 8:34am | IP Logged | ||
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I've been learning Spanish at school for the last semester, and I had taken a couple of years worth of courses previously. Now, I'd describe myself as high beginner to low intermediate, so I haven't hit that major brick wall everyone's been talking about. Now, from a grammatical standpoint, I find Spanish to be very easy to grasp coming from English. Noun gender I actually find to be relatively difficult, and to be honest that's the one part of the language I could actually really do without, but the rest of the grammar is very easy to pick up, at least to a certain degree. Putting it into practice is much harder for me, but at the very least the theory is easier to grasp than the other language I'm currently studying: Finnish. Now, Finnish is very different from English, both in grammar and vocabulary, but I find it much easier to learn and speak than Spanish, and that's simply because I have a passion for Finnish. And I think that's the real truth to the difficulty of languages. Learning a language is a full time commitment, and it takes huge amounts of time to become conversational or even fluent, so passion is obviously a key. Which is why many people find Spanish easy initially, but they quit when it gets difficult. And for me, that's why I can put the time and effort into the vastly more different language, but I struggle with the language that is actually related to my own.
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| daveyboy Newbie Spain Joined 5063 days ago 33 posts - 46 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 46 of 73 12 June 2010 at 5:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't think Spanish is an easy language to learn, the basics are easy enough like: my name / your name / how are you / good morning etc etc. The verbs can be mastered if they are practised quite allot with different kinds of drills [ I use the verbarrator ] It's a very good program software. I think the pronouns can be tricky if say your using them with the past participle, for example: me ha dicho or le hemos dicho or os hemos dicho. Word for word In English they would be: Me he has said or him we have told or you guys we have told, they are the other way round in English and cause problems..haha.. But again lots of practise with audio or Flashcards can really get them cemented in to the brain. Now it's a very good feeling to be able to speak great Spanish [ I am still waiting ..lol.] but then comes the time when you go to Spain or somewhere else where they speak Spanish and then BOOM it hits you right in the face with shock! You ask someone on the street for directions, when they reply to you with the words coming out of their mouth at 200 miles an hour and you understand absolutely nothing then it is a much bigger problem. I would say the hardest part of learning Spanish is the listening comprehension, when you talk / listen to the natives, It's very hard to understand what they are saying, especially the everyday people on the street. I think once you have mastered that then your well and truly near fluent. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Raчraч Ŋuɲa Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5599 days ago 154 posts - 233 votes Speaks: Bikol languages*, Tagalog, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, Russian, Japanese | Message 47 of 73 11 July 2010 at 1:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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When we say something is easy, we usually have an unstated reference point. Although
most people would say that an easy language would depend on your native language, I would say it has more to do with the next alternative or contender foreign language you have the opportunity (or necessity) to learn, which in this case is French in most of Europe and North America. Really, if there are only two language in existence and they are totally unrelated, we wouldn't talk if it would be easy or difficult to learn the other as we wouldn't have any benchmark to compare with. I think the sheep's clothing here for Spanish are: 1. (Easier than French) Its orthography is more regular than English. 2. (Easier than French) It has 5 vowels and 19 consonants, which are even less than English and moreso if learning Andalucian and Latin American varieties. 3. (Like French) It doesn't have grammatical cases, thus similar to English. 4. (Like French) Lots of words shared with English. Apart from the above, I find other aspects of Spanish more difficult: 1. (Harder than French) More verb conjugations that combine mood, tense, person, number, politeness, voice than English. 2. (Harder than French) Much more common use of subjunctive mood than English. 3. (Harder than French I think) Subjects are without fix place in the sentence and can be left out entirely unlike English. 4. (Like French) Adjectives and object pronouns are in a different order than English. 5. (Like French) The prepositions doesn't map regularly with English prepositions. 6. (Like French) Gender of the nouns which needs to be memorized, which English doesn't have. 7 (Harder than French) Concord or agreement between nouns and articles, demonstratives and adjectives for number and gender, as well as between verbs, subjects and objects for person and number is more complicated than English. If Spanish is easy, French would be easier, although my opinion is not that good enough as I only dabbled slightly in French for about 3 months, and a long time ago. French is only superficially harder because of spelling and pronunciation, the same problem I had when learning English (apart from vocabulary). So for me, Spanish is harder to learn. But then again, most of us really doesn't mind how difficult they are, we just love to learn them and use them as soon as we can. Let me know if I missed anything about French. Edited by Raчraч Ŋuɲa on 11 July 2010 at 2:16pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6220 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 48 of 73 11 July 2010 at 4:28pm | IP Logged | ||
Italian and Spanish genders are easier than French (or German) ones, as the last letter of nouns usually gives you a clue as to which gender it is. French and German have guidelines too, but they're more complex. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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