Is it easy to learn Spanish if you know English?
Spanish is a part of the Ibero-Romance group of languages of the Indo-European language family, which evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in Iberia after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. The oldest Latin texts with traces of Spanish come from mid-northern Iberia in the 9th century, and the first systematic written use of the language happened in Toledo, a prominent city of the Kingdom of Castile, in the 13th century. Modern Spanish was then taken to the viceroyalties of the Spanish Empire beginning in 1492, most notably to America, as well as territories in Africa and the Philippines. It is also a Romance language, with nearly 500 million native speakers, mainly in Spain and America. As a Romance language, Spanish is a descendant of Latin and has one of the smaller degrees of difference from it (about 20%) alongside Sardinian and Italian. Around 75% of modern Spanish vocabulary is derived from Latin, including Latin borrowings from Ancient Greek. It has absorbed vocabulary from other languages, particularly other Romance languages such as French, Italian, Mozarabic, Portuguese, Galician, Catalan, Occitan, and Sardinian, as well as from Quechua, Nahuatl, and other indigenous languages of America.
So how easy or diffucult is Spanish for an English speaker?
This choice should not come as a surprise. Because of its practicality and wide reach, Spanish has always been a go-to language for English speakers to learn. It’s also one of the simplest languages for English speakers to learn. According to FSI, Spanish is the closest language to English, which means it is the easiest for an English speaker to learn!
Because Spanish is a Romance language that derives from Latin, as do many English words, the name of the game is cognates, cognates, cognates. To name a few, correcto means “correct,” delicioso means “delicious,” and pizza means “pizza.”
Spanish pronunciation is also fairly simple. It’s a phonetic language, which means that the majority of its words are pronounced the same way they’re written. However, Spanish grammar is not all that easy. There are several different verb tenses and exceptions to grammar rules in Spanish, which can be confusing; however, the tenses are largely the same as those used in English.
Finally,
It’s perhaps the pervasiveness in our daily lives that makes learning Spanish,
the most compelling reason! Spanish is the world’s second most spoken language, with over 450 million native speakers, and an almost 41m native Spanish speakers alone in the USA! By 2050 the USA is expected to become the largest Spanish speaking country in the world leaving Mexico and Spain behind.
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