Is Spanish Hard to Learn?

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😅 CORRECTIONS:

- It should read "Tú peleas" in the chart at 7:10

⏱ TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 - Spanish is easy, right?
0:17 - What’s Your Mother Tongue?
0:59 - Spanish Alphabet & Pronunciation
3:55 - These Things Are Hard
6:15 - Fun, Not Hard
6:55 - Conjugating Verbs is Hard
7:42 - Some Dialects Are a Little… Strange
8:32 - So… What’s the Verdict?

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[asdrubaleduardo]

I’m watching this being a native Spanish speaker just because, you know, it’s always interesting to know the English speakers perspective.

[marcelobaute]

The good thing about Spanish is the consistency in its pronunciation. If you already know the sounds, every time you come across a new word, you can feel pretty confident on how to pronounce it. That's why we don't have spelling games on TV like in English speaking countries. Think about all the different sounds an 'a' can have in an English word.

[styleniko]

I am Japanese learning Spanish as my third language after Japanese and English. My English skill gives me a bit of advantage but the conjugation is driving me crazy!! But the fact that Spanish is spoken by so many people in the world that I am inspired to learn the language!!

[alejonightwish]

I guess the most difficult part about learning Spanish is to understand fluid conversations. Spanish is the second fastest language apparently. And also the conjugation and the fact that the subject is normally dropped because the meaning is also heavily dependent on the conjugation. Other than that, it's relatively easy to learn compared to other languages.

[johnlawrence]

I studied German and Spanish at Uni. I found German the harder language overall, but much easier to distinguish and understand when spoken than Spanish.

[idraote]

I wouldn't underestimate the difficulty of understanding natural conversations in Spanish.
Spanish natives speak very fast and it's incredible the number of syllables they are capable of cramming into a single breath.
I am a native Italian and my only real problem with the written language is memorising verb conjugations.
But undestanding two natives speaking in informal/semi-formal situations? That's a whole different story.

[j-t]

The word ‘se’ was the hardest part for me by a mile. It has so many uses, that when I would encounter it - I would be stopped in my tracks for a minute until I could mentally go through its list of uses, until I found the one that most matched the sentence I needed it for.
Always heard of the horrors of subjunctive -but when it came to learning it, I was surprised how quickly it made sense to me.

[irinaspalve]

I love Spanish because it is so easy to read! And many words can be understood easily without learning. Never thought I would be learning Spanish, but due to I got ill with Covid last year, I suddenly realized that I have quite a few free time, so I just filled it with useful things.
Thanks for Russian and Latvian, rolling R an Ñ were no problem for me. And English helped with c/z (th) sound.

This year I finished reading my first non-adaptated book in Spanish. And the feeling was awesome! Reading a book of my favourite Japanese writer in Spanish - that was an adventure. It took me 3 months, but it was worth it. 😍

By the way, Spanish Uncovered Intermediate is just awesome! I finally could learn the difference between past tenses. 😁 before I could understand the meaning but when I had to write a sentence myself, I couldn't stop thinking - which tense do I have to take. 😀

[corinna]

I've always thought Spanish is the most beautiful Romance language. I had to take mandatory French classes for four years in school. I did well in the classes but I could never keep the grammatical gender straight, and the pronunciation was really irritating. I find Spanish much easier to learn; the pronunciation is a lot more straightforward (although the rolled R took me forever to say properly; I wasn't able to pronounce it until a couple of years ago, thanks to learning Finnish. Still waiting and hoping for a video about that language, btw), and the grammatical genders are so much easier to remember.

[kensier]

I used to hear my family speaking spanish and thought it sounded fast. I finally became fluent this year and it doesn’t sound so fast to me anymore. I started wondering if I just talk with a bunch of slow speakers but I realized I’m just used to it now. What’s funny is my Spanish speaking friends that don’t speak English think English is spoken way faster and I always have to explain that it’s scientifically not true.

[Tehui]

I look forward to starting my Spanish language journey in about a year's time. I've been learning my heritage language (Māori) for nearly 4 years now. I'm at a B2 level in that language and want to push it up to an advanced C level first, before I decide to start learning Spanish too. As it happens, the pronunciation of Spanish is exactly the same as Māori.

[dayanyushkadfajardonova]

What I see is that Spanish can be easy to learn in the basics, but hard to master and speak properly or sound natural due to the subjunctive, for some people, the use of the articles and in general to learn how to use the tenses properly can be a challenge, but, it is not impossible, what I think could help is practicing a lot with native speakers, it will help you to gather the enough practice to make the tenses more intuitive.

Btw, I did not see anyone mentioned it, but, the conjugation of Tú pelea, should be Tú peleas* 😊

[qooraf]

I think the hardest part to me was to get good listening comprehension in Spanish. I learned Spanish from English and it took a very long time to be able to understand natives.

[keinnerflores]

The thing with the question marks is pretty simple: A question in english change the structure of the sentence:
You are ready
Are you ready?
In spanish we don't do that, it does still the same in most cases:
Estás listo
¿Estás listo?
It helps a lot to know where a question begins.

[sherezadeetchebarne]

Hey Olli!!! :D My native language is spanish (I'm from Perú) and this video is absolutely accurate, I agree that the best way to learn it is by reading, it's really helpful that words are pronounce as they are written and you can guess a lot of meaning through the context. And People from latin america can undersrand european spanish at 99.99% so you can learn any of them and be able to understand both of them.

[paulwalther]

As an English speaker I think Spanish is easy while you’re learning the most common grammar and vocabulary and then it’s still easy into intermediate thanks to the cognates but then you hit the plateau if you want to get to advanced then it gets hard. But intermediate is good enough for most people.

[Ramkcore]

Native Spanish speaker here. Out of curiosity, I looked up a few Spanish Language for foreigners resources and noticed how in most of them, people speak really slowly, at least in comparison to how the majority of natives speak in real life. This probably also makes the language seem harder than it actually is. I noticed the same thing with French when I took lessons a few years ago, the resources were very clear and easy to listen to, but I could barely keep up when I heard natives speaking.

In contrast, the lessons I took in German and Japanese were a bit closer to reality. German isn't too fast, so hearing natives speaking wasn't as shocking. Japanese, on the other hand, is spoken at about the same speed as Spanish, sometimes even faster, and they don't pull any punches when it comes to speed with their resources. At least not the ones I'm using, which are often just as fast.
Luckily, since I speak a similarly speedy language which happens to use almost the exact same phonemes, that part hasn't really been an issue, at least not yet.

[arielbarbosa]

Portuguese is my first language.Both Spanish and Portuguese have a way more verb conjugations than English.I would not worry much about pronunciation at first, but make sure I can master the verb conjugation of the most common verbs I use in my mother tongue.

[phillip]

Viva el Español, también me defiendo con el Inglés pero lamentablemente hay mucho nativo del inglés que critica porque tenemos un acento muy marcado o porque a veces es difícil pronunciar algunas palabras. Yo no le diría eso a ninguna persona que esté intentando hablar Español y más bien le ayudaría a darse a entender.

[analuizahenriques]

Spanish comes really easy to me, since i'm Brazilian and learned italian. But even if I can already understand almost 100% of it, I want to study it properly in the future, it's so beautiful