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I think the converse doesn't always apply. I imagine it is easier for an English speaker to learn Spanish than it is for a Spanish speaker to learn English. T
by fbarred 9y ago
I think the converse doesn't always apply. I imagine it is easier for an English speaker to learn Spanish than it is for a Spanish speaker to learn English.
To see why, look at the common English-Spanish cognates. Most English speaker will recognize the cognates that one learns in Spanish 101 - dormir (to sleep, from dormitory), comenzar (to begin, from commence), mascota (pet, from mascot).
But reverse isn't true - words like "sleep", "begin", "pet" will sounds completely foreign to a Spanish speaker. Sure, the cognates will help them learn "dormitory", "commence", and "mascot", but those are advanced words that a learner of English may not encounter in a long time, if ever.
- DiThi 9y agoDefinitely. One big pain point when learning English is phonetics, specifically the 12-15 vowels, and how frequently I fail predicting how a word is pronounced from the spelling. One has to be prepared to spend a lot of time learning _two_ language vocabularies: written and spoken. This is not true of most European languages (you can exactly know how a word is pronounced from the spelling).
- dep_b 9y agoEnglish is like a good board game. Easy to learn, hard to master.
- dep_b 9y agoTrue, my wife speaks Spanish and I was amazed at first about what fancy words she usually picked in a conversation. But those are the words that are Latin based and are common words in Spanish. In English there's often a more common Germanic word.