Spanish is NOT an easy language!

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Ghost
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Spanish is NOT an easy language!

Post by Ghost »

If my rate of progress is any indication, I'll be fluent by the time I'm in a nursing home. People always say "Spanish is an easy language!" No, no, it isn't.

Now, every language has easy parts. That is true. And trying to judge how difficult a language is always depends on where you start from and what your native language is.

Spanish phonetics are easy. Drop dead easy. And there are plenty of cognates. (But the false friends counter balance that.)

So it is easy to pronounce and many words sound familiar. OK, that's where easiness ends with Spanish.

The conjugations of the verbs are killing me. And there are so many irregular verbs. Really, if Spanish didn't conjugate verbs, it really would be an easy language. And some languages are like that. Mandarin doesn't have conjugations. Spanish is getting me so down I'd almost rather give it up right now and go back to trying Chinese.

I study about 30-60 minutes a day. Mainly verbs and their preterite, present, and future conjugations. I was doing more before but I was learning much at all. I do some vocabulary also. I listen to music in Spanish everyday now and my listening has improved. I don't often understand everything, but I can often get the gist of the song. I guess main thing is that I need practice. I don't have to go far for that, but I don't think I'm willing to go around looking for Hispanics at Wal-Mart or something. I've delayed my next chapter of being Happier Abroad partially because I can't seem to improve my Spanish very much.

It's not easy. So many people in the U.S. were raised bilingual. They are really lucky on that count.
Last edited by Ghost on October 24th, 2016, 6:39 am, edited 1 time in total.
fschmidt
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Post by fschmidt »

Learning Spanish formally like this is painful but I don't think it is necessary. You don't really need the future tense at all. Instead of saying "I will do something" just say "I am going to do something" ("voy hacer algo"). For the past tense, the "I" and "you" singular are enough. With this you can communicate and you can pick up the rest passively with practice.
OutWest
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Re: Spanish is NOT an easy language!

Post by OutWest »

Ghost wrote:If my rate of progress is any indication, I'll be fluent by the time I'm in a nursing home. People always say "Spanish is an easy language!" No, no, it isn't.

Now, every language has easy parts. That is true. And trying to judge how difficult a language is always depends on where you start from and what your native language is.

Spanish phonetics are easy. Drop dead easy. And there are plenty of cognates. (But the false friends counter balance that.)

So it is easy to pronounce and many words sound familiar. OK, that's where easiness ends with Spanish.

The conjugations of the verbs are killing me. And there are so many irregular verbs. Really, if Spanish didn't conjugate verbs, it really would be an easy language. And some languages are like that. Mandarin doesn't have conjugations. Spanish is getting me so down I'd almost rather give it up right now and go back to trying Chinese.

I study about 30-60 minutes a day. Mainly verbs and their preterite, present, and future conjugations. I was doing more before but I was learning much at all. I do some vocabulary also. I listen to music in Spanish everyday now and my listening has improved. I don't often understand everything, but I can often get the gist of the song. I guess main thing is that I need practice. I don't have to go far for that, but I don't think I'm willing to go around looking for Hispanics at Wal-Mart or something. I've delayed my next chapter of being Happier Abroad partially because I can't seem to improve my Spanish very much.

It's not easy. So many people in the U.S. were raised bilingual. They are really lucky on that count.
There is a better way. If at all possible, get into a language immersion school in Mexico or Guatemala.
In the historic city of Antigua Guatemala, such schools are about the biggest industry there.
You are not just learning the words and language, you are experiencing context and the culture behind it. Additionally, Antigua is breathtakingly beautiful and the schools are cheap. Typically, you have half a day of classes and the rest of your day is yours to explore and socialize. Even just 30 days there does wonders, and 60 days is amazing.
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Yohan
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Re: Spanish is NOT an easy language!

Post by Yohan »

Ghost wrote: The conjugations of the verbs are killing me. And there are so many irregular verbs. Really, if Spanish didn't conjugate verbs, it really would be an easy language. And some languages are like that. Mandarin doesn't have conjugations. Spanish is getting me so down I'd almost rather give it up right now and go back to trying Chinese.
You are worried too much about grammar - and you think too little about vocabulary and how to talk 'fluently'. Native speakers can understand you even if you make mistakes and if it sounds 'funny' to them.

Often languages from Europe are remarkably complicated. As a native German speaker I am surprised how it is possible that some foreigners can speak my native language without grammatical mistakes. Russian is even more difficult. However it is all and everything only about that you are living in a region, where German is spoken and that you listen how native speakers will reply to you and that you repeat what you hear from them. Basically it is about using the foreign language with native speakers every day.

Without native speakers next to you, I would say, don't ruin your day with grammar.

Englsh-Spanish cannot be compared with English-Chinese. Standard Chinese 普通话 (as used in Beijing 北方话) is very much more complicated regarding pronunciation and writing. It takes a native English speaker without any prior relationship to China several years to become somewhat familiar with the Chinese spoken and written language.

Living in Japan since decades I can read a lot of standard Chinese despite Japanese and Chinese are following different grammatical rules. However I do not have any knowledge about how to speak it correctly, despite many characters have similar pronunciation and similar meaning.

As said foreign languages are more or less about daily exercise, if used every day, your knowledge will improve up similar to a native speaker, if not, your knowledge will decline and finally disappear.

It is also a bit about if you like a certain foreign language or not. I am many times in Thailand, but I do not like the Thai language, neither how it is spoken, nor how it is written. Simply said, I do not like to learn it.

BTW, I am not a native English speaker and have no native English speaker next to me to correct me, neither at home nor in office.
I simply don't care, if my English (my language no. 4) is correct or not.
Traveler
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Post by Traveler »

According to Stephen Krashen, one of the top experts on second language acquisition in the world, you don't need to make a conscious effort to learn grammar rules. If you immerse yourself in listening and reading materials in the foreign language, you'll eventually learn the rules without even trying.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqVhgSvw ... r_embedded
Johnny1975
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Post by Johnny1975 »

fschmidt wrote:Learning Spanish formally like this is painful but I don't think it is necessary. You don't really need the future tense at all. Instead of saying "I will do something" just say "I am going to do something" ("voy hacer algo"). For the past tense, the "I" and "you" singular are enough. With this you can communicate and you can pick up the rest passively with practice.
It's :

voy a hacer algo
I-go to do something
I'm going to do something
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WilliamSmith
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Re: Spanish is NOT an easy language!

Post by WilliamSmith »

Interesting points in this thread.
Re: whether to learn grammar rules, or just pick them up via immersion:
In a language like Spanish that shares a lot of familial roots with English, I agree that if it is driving you crazy then just don't worry about grammar too much and focus more on immersion, vocabulary, etc.

I learned a bit of Spanish while considering the Caribbean and Latin America, found a bunch of Spanish-language Conan the Barbarian comics, and thought it was surprisingly easy to understand anywhere from 50-80% of what they were saying from the shared "familiar" roots with English words, when combined with some pictures. Then when I ran it through Google Translate or DeepL, it was even easier to understand it all and see how it fit together, even without worrying about grammar rules (and never having studied them before).

Personally, though, I feel the opposite about Japanese and Chinese languages (Cantonese and Mandarin), which are the ones I've studied for at least a few years each. To me, outlining grammar points early on was my top priority with both Japanese and Cantonese, so I could distinguish grammar structures and patterns from misc vocabulary words. I guess the key difference is that even though I like the Japanese and Cantonese better than Spanish, they have no familial roots shared with English at all (except "loan words" phoneticized from English words) and it's all alien until you start learning it, so it really helps to be able to distinguish grammar structures from misc vocabulary. Also, the other big thing is that Japanese and Chinese don't use any spaces between the words, :!: :cry: LOL, making it all even harder for a beginner who isn't used to the "East Asian" languages.
With Spanish, on the other hand, I felt like it'd be more fun and practical to just jump straight in with translation material:
It's much better with pics from comic books captions (which I don't have on hand now), but a quick example:

Conan: el epico simbolo de la fantasia heroica
Conan: the epic symbol of heroic fantasy

You can probably tell what that means without even running it through a robo-translator like Google Translate / Bing / DeepL.

But then with something like the one below that's a little tricker, you can still see how nicely it lines up with English roots and structures regardless of the differences, as soon as you run it through the translator:

En este mundo los hombres luchan y sufren en vano, y sólo encuentran placer en el torbellino enloquecedor de la batalla
In this world men fight and suffer in vain, finding pleasure only in the maddening whirlwind of battle.
:D

Image

By the way, other awesome things about Spanish are that it's one of the most masculine languages there is, but it also has a lot of class, and it's got sexual dimorphism built into the language, LOL. ("Gender uncertainty" be damned.) Latinas are also great in the sack.
If you're serious about "taking the red pill," read thoroughly researched work by an unbiased "American intellectual soldier of our age" to learn what controlled media doesn't want you to see 8) : https://www.unz.com/page/american-pravda-series/
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Lucas88
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Re: Spanish is NOT an easy language!

Post by Lucas88 »

I speak Spanish as my first foreign language and I don't think that it is as easy as some people think. The idea that Spanish is somehow an easy language or even THE easy language seems to be popular among Americans but in my view it is nothing but a myth.

Let us ask ourselves: how many of the gringos who learn it actually speak it well? Some people think that it's easy because they have learned some basic grammar and can hold a conversation but most of these people still speak the language with a thick American accent that most Spanish speakers struggle to understand, botch the gender of nouns all the time, still don't know how to use the various subjunctive moods correctly, still haven't mastered verbal aspect (perfect vs. imperfect), and are frequently tripped up by false friends (i.e., misleading cognates). I've met few gringos who actually speak the language well.

Spanish phonology is more or less straightforward but many native Anglophones still struggle with the language's rhythmic quality. They pronounce it in a sing-song manner somewhat like English and it just doesn't turn out right.

Spanish isn't the only European language that shares cognates with English either. French shares more cognates with English due to its direct influence on the latter historically. Italian and Portuguese share as many cognates with English as Spanish. Then the Germanic languages such as German, Dutch and Swedish also share a great deal of lexical similarity with English due to their close genetic relationship. Spanish vocabulary isn't therefore inherently easier than other Western European languages.

The verb system of Spanish is quite complex (on par with Italian and Portuguese). It is somewhat more complex than the verbal system of French, and is substantially more complex than those of the Germanic and Slavic languages with the exception of Bulgarian. A language with a significant amount of verb conjugations, three distinct subjunctive moods (excluding the archaic future subjunctive), marked verbal aspect, and a tendency towards fusional tense constructions is anything but easy.

So in my view Spanish is not such an easy language. In my experience, even German and Scandinavian speakers who are widely regarded as the elite of speakers of English as a second language tend not to have anywhere near the same level of dominion over Spanish as they do over English when they study it as a third language. They struggle with many of its grammatical features.

In Spain I've met many immigrants from Eastern Europe who speak Spanish really well though - people from Romania, Bulgaria and Russia. Romanians tend to learn Spanish easily since they themselves speak a Romance language natively, and although Bulgarian and Russian are Slavic languages, I perceive that they share some uncanny grammatical similarities with Spanish, especially when it comes to verb conjugation. Also these people are immigrants and not simply hobbyists and so they feel a great urgency to get good at the language since they know that nobody is going to speak to them in Romanian, Bulgarian or Russian.
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