Prospective students ask us one question more than any other: is Spanish hard? The honest answer is that it is the easiest of the major world languages for an English speaker to learn. The United States Foreign Service Institute, which has trained American diplomats in languages since 1947, puts Spanish in its quickest category, at around 600 to 750 hours of class time to professional working proficiency, against some 2,200 hours for Japanese, Mandarin or Arabic. Most of our students hold a real conversation well before that, within a few months of starting.
This guide explains why: where the two languages meet, why Spanish is written the way it sounds, which parts of the grammar behave, and which parts need practice.
Cousins, not strangers
Spanish is a Romance language, one of the family that grew out of the spoken Latin of the Roman Empire, alongside Portuguese, Italian, French, Catalan and Romanian. English belongs to the Germanic family, but it took an enormous quantity of Latin on board, first from the Church and then, after 1066, from French, so that more than half of English vocabulary has a Latin root. The result is that thirty to forty per cent of English words have a recognisable relative in Spanish. These cognates, words that look alike and mean the same, are the head start no learner of Chinese or Arabic gets.
Better still, the relatives come in families, so a handful of patterns unlocks thousands of words at once.
- English -tion is Spanish -ción: nación, información, conversación.
- -ty is -dad: universidad, ciudad, realidad.
- -ly is -mente: rápidamente, normalmente, finalmente.
- -ous is -oso: famoso, curioso, nervioso.
- -ic is -ico, -ist is -ista, -ble stays -ble: fantástico, turista, posible.
Learn the pattern and you can guess the word, and the guess is right far more often than not. The exceptions are few enough to learn as a list, which is why we keep the false friends that trick English speakers on a page of their own.
You say what you see
Spanish is the most phonetic of the main European languages. It has five vowel sounds, one for each vowel letter, and they never change: a is always the a of father, e always the e of bed. The consonants are almost as reliable, and the spelling has been kept regular by the Real Academia Española since 1713. Once you know the sound of each letter you can read any word aloud correctly, and once you hear a word you can spell it. English, with though, through, tough and thought, offers nothing of the kind.
Stress follows two rules and a mark. Words ending in a vowel, n or s are stressed on the second-last syllable; other words on the last; and anything that breaks the rule carries a written accent to tell you so, as in café or rápido. That is the whole system. The rolled r and the throaty j are the only new sounds, and both come with practice; the rest of the case is made in our guide to why Spanish pronunciation is easier than English.
Grammar that behaves
Much of the grammar will feel familiar. Sentences run subject, verb, object, as in English. Plurals are formed by adding -s, or -es after a consonant, and there are no children, mice or sheep. A question needs no do: ¿Hablas español? is simply you speak Spanish? with the voice raised, and the upside-down question mark warns you it is coming. Spanish has no phrasal verbs, the put up with, get over and look after that make English so hard for everyone else.
The differences are real but small. Adjectives usually follow the noun, so the blue dress is el vestido azul, and the habit forms within weeks. Verb endings change with the person, which looks like more to learn and turns out to be less, because the ending tells you who is speaking and the pronoun can be dropped: hablo already means I speak.
The parts that need practice
Every language has a few features with no English equivalent, and in Spanish they are well known and well mapped. Nouns have a gender and adjectives agree with them, which is a matter of habit rather than understanding. Spanish has two verbs for to be, and the choice between ser and estar has a logic that takes a lesson to grasp and a month to make automatic. Two small words, por and para, cover the English for between them. The verb system has more endings than English, but they follow patterns, and three tenses carry most conversation. The subjunctive, which English has all but lost, arrives at intermediate level and is the one topic where a good explanation saves months.
None of these is a reason to hesitate. They are the same handful of points for every English speaker, which means a tutor who has taught them a hundred times knows exactly where you will stumble and what unsticks it; we set out the common struggles and their fixes in a guide of their own.
How long, then?
With a lesson a week and some practice in between, a beginner is holding a conversation within a few months. Working proficiency, the level at which you can do your job in Spanish, sits at the far end of the Foreign Service Institute’s 600 hours and is reached faster by people who speak from the first week, which is what one-to-one lessons make possible. With a deadline, a posting or a move in view, an intensive Spanish course in London compresses the early months into weeks. How long it takes to learn Spanish sets out the timings level by level.
Questions learners ask
Is Spanish easier than French or Italian? All three sit in the same quickest category, and they share most of their vocabulary with each other and a great deal with English. Spanish has the most regular spelling and pronunciation of the three, which is why it tends to be the fastest to speak and to understand.
Is Spanish from Spain or Latin America easier? The language is the same; the difference is accent. The Spanish of Bogotá, Lima or central Spain is slow and clear, and a learner who starts with a neutral standard Spanish is understood everywhere. Our guide to the accents of Spain and Latin America explains the differences.
Am I too old to learn it? No. Adults learn grammar faster than children because they can be told the rule, and the cognates above are an adult’s advantage, since they reward a large English vocabulary. Adults of every age learn it, and the ones who progress fastest are the ones who speak most.
Making the most of the head start
Spanish gives an English speaker more for free than any other major language: half the vocabulary, a spelling you can trust and a grammar that mostly follows the same lines. What remains is practice, and the fastest form of it is conversation with a native speaker who corrects you as you go. That is what private Spanish lessons at your home or office are for, and it is why the question our students ask a few months later is not whether Spanish is hard, but which country to use it in first.
Make the most of the head start English gives you. See how lessons with a Spanish tutor in London work.
Read next: Why Spanish pronunciation is easier than English · False friends in Spanish: The words that trick English speakers · Why learn Spanish?