Learning a new language can be an exciting but challenging journey. If you’ve just started learning Spanish or are contemplating whether to begin, you might be wondering: “Is Spanish hard to learn”? This article addresses this question and provides some insights into how hard it is to learn Spanish, especially for beginners.
Here in Coffee Break Spanish, we believe learning a language is not and shouldn’t be difficult, so today’s episode is a bit special, and we thought it could be a nice idea to test your understanding of the language. That way you’ll see you are able to say and understand more than what you think! Then you could answer the question, “Is Spanish hard to learn?”.
Listen to the audio to test yourself and revise.
Is Spanish hard to learn?
The question “Is Spanish hard to learn?” is common among new learners. The answer, however, is not straightforward. It depends on several factors, including your native language, learning methods, and personal commitment.
Factors that make Spanish easier to learn
Is Spanish hard to learn? The short answer is no. There are at least three aspects of the Spanish language that prove this point.
Phonetic Language
Spanish is largely phonetic, meaning words are pronounced as they are written. This can be a significant advantage for beginners because once you know the rules, there are no exceptions. Practice now and read out loud the following sentence that contains some of the “trickiest” sounds.
- Hola, me llamo Juan. Hello, my name is Juan.
- ¡Feliz Año Nuevo! Happy New Year!
If you would like to know how to say Merry Christmas or Happy New Year in Spanish and get to know some other useful phrases for these holidays, don’t miss our episode on it!
Cognates
Spanish shares many cognates with English—words that look similar and have the same meaning. Can you guess what the following words in Spanish mean?
- el animal
- la familia
- la música
Of course, the answers are animal, family and music! So is Spanish hard to learn? As you can see, some vocabulary is actually very easy.
Factors that could make Spanish challenging
Now, how hard is it to learn Spanish? Actually, there are some aspects of the language that could make learning a bit more challenging. We’ll focus on two main ones.
Verb Conjugations
Spanish verbs conjugate differently based on tense, mood, and subject. This can be tricky for beginners to master, but practice makes perfect!
So far, you’ll be learning two ways of saying or asking things in Spanish – the formal and the informal thing. The verb is different in these cases and basically whenever the subject changes. For example:
- Soy profesor. – I am a teacher.
- Mi hermano es profesor. – My brother is a teacher.
Gendered Nouns
Every noun in Spanish has a gender (masculine or feminine), and this affects adjectives and articles. We could look into this in the article and episode about professions in Spanish, but here you have an example:
- Mi hermana es ingeniera. – My sister is an engineer.
- Mi hermano es ingeniero. – My brother is an engineer.
Practice with a dialogue
To help you practise and see how much you’ve learned so far, here are some interesting sentences from today’s episode. The dialogue is longer, so if you want to challenge yourself a bit more after testing your Spanish with this extract, go there to listen to the full conversation!
Now try understanding the dialogue. You can either write the translation or explain what’s going on – it’s up to you! After this, you will be able to answer yourself the question “is Spanish hard to learn”.
- Eva: Hola, buenos días. ¿Qué tal?
- Juan: Hola. Muy bien. Y tú, ¿qué tal?
- Eva: Yo, fenomenal. Yo soy Eva. ¿Cómo te llamas?
- Juan: Me llamo Juan. Este es mi hijo.
- Miguel: Hola, me llamo Miguel.
- Juan: Miguel y yo somos de Mallorca, de Alcudia.
- Eva: Pues… me tengo que ir. Hasta otra.
- Juan: Sí, hasta otra.
- Miguel: ¡Adiós!
You can find the translation of the sentences along with the full conversation in the episode audio. This exercise will help you see how well you can understand and translate basic Spanish conversations.
So, is Spanish hard to learn? The difficulty of learning Spanish varies from person to person, but we hope you have seen that you can make progress just by practising a little bit consistently!
If wanting to continue learning the language and would like to learn how to say you speak a little Spanish, in episode 11 we’ll teach you the basics to navigate those situations where we have to say that we don’t fully understand.
Hasta entonces, happy Coffee Breaking!
