If you are an English speaker, starting to learn Spanish is much easier because of fundamental similarities in the letter, words and grammar. Many of the basic words are very similar in pronunciation with their roots in the Latin language. Although some words with same pronunciation can have entirely different meaning. An example of this is “private” in Spanish means “possible”. With these similarities, learning Spanish for English speakers is genuinely easier. However, there are differences as well.
Spanish is the fourth most spoken language in the world and if you travel you are more likely to meet some people with Spanish as their language. In the Americas, most of the people are familiar with Spanish language and Mexico and the USA are the first and second country with most Spanish speaking people. So there is no shortage to find people to practice.
Both languages have their roots in Latin, so they have similar sounding words. This is especially beneficial while you start learning, and that will give you an idea of what they mean before anyone tells you. It makes it more interesting to delve into the Spanish language. The alphabets in Spanish are identical to English. So there’s something you would not need to learn from scratch. Some do have different pronunciations, however. Written Spanish language is similar to English differing for some letters with accents. Grammar also isn’t complicated compared to the English Language.
The Spanish language has 30-40% cognates (similar sounding words) with the Spanish language. This helps you grow your vocabulary and make it easier to keep in memory. With the similarities and proficiency in the English language, your brain adapt well to the Spanish language.
The alphabets in the Spanish language are same to the ones in English, but the letters have different pronunciation. For example, “h” does not have sound. The word “hombre” is pronounced as “ohmbre” and “y” may be pronounced like English “y” or like English “j” depending on the dialect. The letter “q” is always followed by “u”. But the word “que” is pronounced as “k” and “quien” as “kien”. There are more confusing parts like these.
The nouns in the Spanish language can be assigned genders. Any word ending with “o” is meant to masculine, and anything ending in “a” is feminine. However, many words do not follow this rule which causes confusions. The Spanish language has many dialects, so it depends on how you approach people with your Spanish language.
With SpanishTarifa, we start off with the fundamental similarities and cognates that make learning Spanish more comfortable, to begin with. As the courses continue, the complex portions are added in for better grasp. We understand that having a comfortable start to a language is important and similarities with your mother language make it much simpler to learn.