How easy is to learn Spanish?
Spanish or Castilian is a Romance language within Iberian group. It is one of the six official UN languages, and is the second most spoken language in the world by the number of people who are native speakers, after Mandarin Chinese. It is also an official language in several major international political and economic organizations (EU, AU OAS, OEI, NAFTA UNASUR, Caricom, and the Antarctic Treaty, among others). It is spoken as a first and second language by more than 450 million people and over 500 million people if you count those who have learned as a foreign language can be the third most spoken language by total speakers. on the other hand, Spanish is the second most studied language in the world after English, with more than 20 million students although other sources indicate that surpass the 46 million students in 90 countries, and the third most used language on the Internet (7.8% of total).
But how easy is to learn Spanish? How many words or expressions are there meaning different things in different regions or countries?
The beauty of this language is that there are many words or expressions which the meaning may vary depending on the country or the region. For a person that is learning Spanish through college or university at a high level, and then decide to travel around the different Spanish speaking countries, can be confusing and some time frustrating. For instance if you have studied Spanish in Spain an you go to Argentina you will notice that many words will mean different of what you have learned. For example “plata” in Spain means silver and in Argentina is the word used for money. You also will find that the way they conjugate the verbs differs from all those verb drills you learned at uni or collage. This happens all though South America and Spain.
To overcome this, my advice will be to talk however you learned in the country you studied and if you talk to someone speaking in a different way than you, you should be patient and learn from them by asking the meaning of the different words they are using.
Here is fun video from two “colobianos” who have composed a very decrypting song about the problems of learning Spanish.
As always leave your comments.