What Makes Spanish Difficult for English Speakers? Here's 3 Pain Points to Consider
English speakers notoriously have trouble with Spanish grammar and pronunciation. But why is it difficult? And how can we make it easier? In this article, we'll explore the three biggest reasons why Spanish is difficult to learn for English speakers.
In this article
1. Nouns have a grammatical gender
Unlike English, every noun in Spanish has a gender. This makes it more difficult to learn as it's an additional thing to memorize and the genders often aren't intuitive. For example, consider these two words:
La casa
The house
Los zapatos
The shoes
For first-time readers, it's hard to tell much at all about these words at first glance. However, any Spanish speaker will tell you la casa is feminine and los zapatos is masculine.
To learn these differences, have a look at our article on grammatical gender for tips on how to determine the gender of any noun:
Many parts of the sentence also change based on gender, so you'll have to learn those too.
2. Pronunciation can be tricky
Spanish shares a lot of sounds with English. However, some sounds in Spanish don't exist in English.
For example, the trilled R sound is typically the hardest for English speakers to learn. Here's a quick video if you'd like to give it a try:
Listening and speaking in immersive settings are often the best ways to get accustomed to Spanish sounds.
3. Numerous conjugations make it difficult
If you ask someone who has learned Spanish what they thought was the most difficult part, they'll probably say the conjugations.
Conjugations are basically different variants of a verb that are used in different contexts. For example, the phrases "I go" and "She goes", convey same idea of "going", however a different form of the verb "to go" is used. This works the same way in Spanish, but is much more complicated. You'll have to learn different conjugations for each verb while considering the pronoun, tense, etc.
Despite the difficulties of learning Spanish, we're here to help you every step of the way. We wish you the best on your Spanish learning journey.