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Hard to learn Spanish ?


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you guys have to be joking about English being difficult, try an indigenous language here or Chinese, Arabic Japanese or Fin or many other languages that are way more difficult to learn than English..

 

Tere is a reason is  the first language people learn.. it is flexible , has  poor vocabulary and simple grammar . You can make words or exprssions that people will understand with prepositions  and puttng words together , you do not have that flexibility in many languages and this is why English is taking over many other languages,

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I was taught in school that learning Spanish for an English speaking person was one of the easier languages to learn. And I found it easier to learn than other European languages I was exposed to in the 1960s.

Do I speak Spanish well? God gracious NO 😃. But I found it easier to learn than Dutch or German, the other two languages I was exposed to in the '60s

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1 hour ago, bmh said:

you guys have to be joking about English being difficult, try an indigenous language here or Chinese, Arabic Japanese or Fin or many other languages that are way more difficult to learn than English..

 

Tere is a reason is  the first language people learn.. it is flexible , has  poor vocabulary and simple grammar . You can make words or exprssions that people will understand with prepositions  and puttng words together , you do not have that flexibility in many languages and this is why English is taking over many other languages,

Any language is learned the same way... words then words with prepositions etc. etc.

Perhaps it is not the spoken English language that is the problem so much as properly learning how to spell the English language. Interestingly enough, I know a lot of native Spanish speakers here but their written Spanish skills are atrocious. 

And people born and raised in Europe have always had a distinct advantage because of all the spoken languages that they are exposed to from an early age.

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I think that written and pronounced Spanish is much easier to learn than English, as it is pretty much spelled exactly as it sounds. And each letter is always pronounced the same, no multiple vowel sounds or silent letter combos or "gh" in "enough" beiing pronpunced as an "f". Once you know the pronunciation, it's simple. 

Where Spanish is more difficult for native English speakers is in all the verb tenses and that the verb changes for each pronoun. 

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I think it depends how your brain is wired.. My sister had much less.problems learning German than I did and I picked up English much faster than she did then she picked up Italian very easily and i did the same with Spanish.

I also took  Russian while living in England.. it has 6 cases versus 4 in German and the different alphabet is another handicap but it is totally  phonetic once you know the alphabet. A british friend who taught German.picked up Rusdian very quickly and went to live in Russia after studying the language for one year. She could get by after one year and I could not

 

 

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it's the tenses and irregular verbs for me. And even though we have lived a total of just over six years in Mexico and Central America I still struggle to understand locals speaking Spanish at their normal speed. THAT has been the hardest part, the comprehension. I can ask questions all day long, no problem, but understanding the answers makes me feel like a beginner.

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5 hours ago, dixonge said:

... but understanding the answers makes me feel like a beginner.

A street hustler guy I know stopped by the table where I was having coffee with a Mexican friend. After he went on his way, I told my friend how I always had trouble understanding that guy. My friend said: Don't worry. I couldn't understand him, either. 🙂

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51 minutes ago, Victor David said:

I told my friend how I always had trouble understanding that guy. My friend said: Don't worry. I couldn't understand him, either. 🙂

I had a similar experience. Standing with a Mexican friend when one of those old ranchero guys with the slurred, mush-mouthed Spanish was trying to tell us something. I turned to my friend and asked what the guy had just said, and she answered "F***ed if I know. I couldn't understand a word of it".

 

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6 hours ago, dixonge said:

it's the tenses and irregular verbs for me.

There's plenty of irregular verbs in English, too, we just don't think about it because we're native English speakers. 

"To be", for instance. "I am, you are, he is." Any of those verb forms sound anything alike? 🙂

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2 hours ago, mudgirl said:

There's plenty of irregular verbs in English, too, we just don't think about it because we're native English speakers. 

"To be", for instance. "I am, you are, he is." Any of those verb forms sound anything alike? 🙂

This is true. I think part of my problem is that I'm always looking for a system or a pattern. And Spanish verb conjugations *promise* a pattern, and the majority of words adhere to it, but there are just enough irregulars that it destroys my sense of pattern, my hope that I can just learn a system to apply to large groups of words. It breaks its promise *sigh*

 

 

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45 minutes ago, dixonge said:

but there are just enough irregulars that it destroys my sense of pattern

Well, that's why they're called irregular, because there's no pattern, you just have to memorize them.

My big revelation in learning Spanish was the day I realized that what seemed overwhelming to me in learning all the verb tenses was actually not overwhelming at all- that it's the present and past tenses that are the hardest to learn- the others, including the compound tenses, are easy and do follow a simple pattern.

But it's much harder to learn those things if one doesn't actually know grammar terms in their native language, which a lot of people don't. I was one of those kids who thought diagramming a sentence in school was dead easy and fun. 

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2 hours ago, mudgirl said:

Well, that's why they're called irregular, because there's no pattern, you just have to memorize them.

My big revelation in learning Spanish was the day I realized that what seemed overwhelming to me in learning all the verb tenses was actually not overwhelming at all- that it's the present and past tenses that are the hardest to learn- the others, including the compound tenses, are easy and do follow a simple pattern.

But it's much harder to learn those things if one doesn't actually know grammar terms in their native language, which a lot of people don't. I was one of those kids who thought diagramming a sentence in school was dead easy and fun. 

Pink Floyd is the bomb--!!

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English irregular verbs are easy if you speak German it is the same change of vowels..The really odd balls like to be ou just have to learn to remember it is not complicated All languages I  have studied have irregular verbs it is a question of memorizing them . I think the English grammar is so simple compare to French for exemple that the children are not taught how to analyse a sentence hence the problem. 

In Tzotzil you have to know if the verb is transitive or no and the structure of the sentence changes..

The Tzotzil have 13 different suffixes to add to the numbers so if you count a bunch of leaves you will not use the same word as if you count corn or animals...and so on and anyone who says English is one of the most difficult language should have their head examined.. Why do you think so many people speak English.. because they are all super gifted with languages or have a big brain? 

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7 hours ago, mudgirl said:

But it's much harder to learn those things if one doesn't actually know grammar terms in their native language, which a lot of people don't. I was one of those kids who thought diagramming a sentence in school was dead easy and fun. 

The first, last and *only* time I diagrammed a sentence in school was 7th grade. Let's just say that Texas public schools weren't the best. This lack of knowledge has *definitely* played a part in my struggle w/ Spanish.

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Well English grammar is not complicated like others as a result diagram of phrases is not a priority.. In France they teach or taught  grammar and spelling all the way to age 11  every day.. because French grammar and spelling are a bitch

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