Is Spanish Hard to Learn? Where English Speakers Get Stuck

Short answer: For an English speaker, Spanish is one of the easier languages to learn, and most of the effort goes into four things: verb endings, the subjunctive, two pairs of words where English uses one (ser and estar, por and para), and following Spanish at native speed.

The US Foreign Service Institute (FSI), which trains American diplomats, puts Spanish in Category I, its group of languages closest to English, with 30 weeks of full-time training to reach level 3 in speaking and listening on the US government’s ILR scale. That is about 690 class hours, at the slow end of the group: Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch take 24 weeks, and Mandarin takes 88. The FSI also expects 17 hours of self-study a week on top of 23 in class, so the full cost is closer to 1,200 hours. [1]

Disclosure: we make Second Language, a game with a Spanish course. Where a section below says how our course handles a hard part, it describes our own design choices, with counts taken from the course files.

Verb endings take most of the study time

Each Spanish verb changes its ending for the person, the number, and the tense, and learning those endings is where a beginner spends most of their time. English adds an -s for he and she and stops there. Spanish tener, "to have," runs tengo, tienes, tiene, tenemos, tienen in the present tense alone, and each past tense, the future, and the conditional bring their own sets. The verbs you need first are the least regular: soy, voy, tengo, hago, and estoy all break the pattern.

Because the ending already says who is acting, Spanish usually leaves out the pronoun. Tengo means "I have" by itself, so you have to catch a short ending at speed to know who did what.

Most Latin American Spanish has no vosotros, the plural "you" used in Spain; it uses ustedes, which shares its ending with ellos, so each tense has five forms to learn instead of six. You can also talk about the future with ir a plus a verb (voy a comer, "I am going to eat") and leave the future tense for later, then add the preterite for finished events.

Our Spanish course’s writing rules call for neutral Latin American Spanish with tú as the default, and none of the 2,500 example sentences in the course uses a vosotros form. We counted the verb forms in all of them: 146 talk about the future with voy a plus a verb, and 284 use a past tense, mostly the preterite, as in Ayer fui a la tienda con mi amigo, "Yesterday I went to the store with my friend." Leaving out those sentences and the 23 with a subjunctive verb, 2,062 of the 2,500 (82 percent) use only the present tense, infinitives, and commands.

Why the subjunctive can wait

The subjunctive is the part of Spanish that English speakers take longest to control, and you can understand a great deal of Spanish before you have it. It is a separate set of verb forms used after wishes, doubts, feelings, and some time words: quiero que vengas, "I want you to come," uses vengas where a plain statement would use vienes. English keeps only traces of it, such as "if I were you."

Joseph Collentine’s 2010 review of research on how learners acquire the subjunctive says the studies point to late acquisition, and that even learners immersed in Spanish are rarely guaranteed to master it. The same review counts 2,085,990 verb forms in the Corpus del español, more than 21 million words of native spoken and written Spanish, and finds the subjunctive in about 7.2 percent of them. [2]

When you do start, learn it in chunks you hear often. The most useful one for a beginner is cuando with a future meaning: cuando llegue a casa, "when I get home." The verb is llegue rather than llego because the arrival has not happened yet.

Our course also leaves the subjunctive for later. The writing guide for the game’s dialog says to avoid it, and only 23 of the 2,500 example sentences have a subjunctive form, about 1 percent. Twenty are in the hardest band, and 16 use that cuando pattern: Voy a llamar a mi madre cuando llegue a casa. Two of the others are short negative commands such as No hables tanto, "Don’t talk so much."

Learn one core use of ser, estar, por, and para first

Ser and estar both translate "to be," and por and para both often translate "for," so English gives you no help in choosing. As a first rule, ser says what something is (soy de Chile, es médico) and estar says where it is or what state it is in (estoy en casa, estoy cansado). The choice can change the meaning: soy aburrido is "I am boring," and estoy aburrido is "I am bored." Some cases go against the first rule, such as la fiesta es en mi casa, "the party is at my house," which uses ser for where an event happens.

Por and para are a second pair where English has one word, "for." Por mostly marks a cause or a route (gracias por todo, "thanks for everything"; camino por el parque, "I walk through the park"), and para marks a purpose or a recipient (trabajo para vivir, "I work to live"; esto es para ti, "this is for you").

Start with the core use of each word and add the exceptions as you meet them. Our list of the 100 most common Spanish words has a short section on ser and estar with more examples.

Spanish speech has about 26 percent more syllables per second

Spoken Spanish packs more syllables into each second than English, so a sentence you can read easily may still be hard to catch by ear. In a 2011 study, François Pellegrino, Christophe Coupé, and Egidio Marsico analyzed recordings of 59 adults reading the same 20 short texts in seven languages at a normal pace. The Spanish speakers averaged 7.82 syllables per second and the English speakers 6.19, about 26 percent more for Spanish. Each Spanish syllable carried less information, and English still came out slightly ahead in information per second. [3] Spanish also runs words together when one ends in a vowel and the next starts with one, so ¿qué es esto? can sound like a single word.

The usual fix is listening practice that starts below native speed and works up to it. Any podcast or video player with a speed setting will do: play a short clip at 0.75x until you can follow it, then again at normal speed.

Spelling and cognates give English speakers a head start

Spanish has five vowel sounds, each written one consistent way, [4] and with a few rules for consonants you can pronounce almost any word you read. Spelling a word you hear is harder: b and v sound the same, h is silent, ll and y sound alike for most speakers, and in Latin America c (before e or i), s, and z all sound like s. Stress is predictable, and a written accent marks the exceptions; our guide to Spanish accent marks explains what each mark does, and the Spanish alphabet page gives every letter’s name and sound.

Shira Lubliner and Elfrieda Hiebert translated two standard English word lists into Spanish for a 2011 study and checked their cognates against a second list. Spanish cognates turned up for 34 percent of the 2,284 words on the General Service List, a list of the most frequent words in written English, and for nearly 75 percent of the 570 words on the Academic Word List. [5] Formal Spanish therefore often looks more familiar than everyday Spanish. Our own 250-word course includes importante, problema, música, idea, hotel, and restaurante. Watch for false friends: embarazada means "pregnant," not "embarrassed."

The trilled rr in perro has no equivalent in English. Even Spanish-speaking children learn it last; a 2018 study of how the trill develops in Costa Rican children aged 3 to 5½ cites earlier research finding it is the last sound they acquire. [6] The single r in pero is easier, since it is the quick tap most American English speakers already make in the middle of "butter." People will understand you with a weak rr while you work on it.

Your first five verbs

Begin with ser, estar, tener, hacer, and ir. Learn their five present-tense forms from sentences, and use voy a plus a verb for anything in the future.

That is the order our course uses: those five verbs are its words 25 to 29, with ser and estar side by side, and a form of ser or estar appears in 581 of its 2,500 example sentences. The first sentences for estar are all about location (Yo estoy en casa), and states such as Ella está feliz come later. The first ones for ser mix identity (¿Quién es él?) with traits, and one of them, Yo quiero ser feliz, already breaks the simple rule: being happy as a life goal takes ser. You can read every one of those sentences, with translations, in our Spanish course browser.