Review of Spanish!

With this review of Spanish, I am presenting some of my own thoughts and opinions of the Spanish language. You can also read reviews of Spanish from other visitors to this site on this page as well, or if you would like, write your own review of Spanish! I feel that getting other peoples opinions actually helps other language learners get a better understanding of the language they are learning or want to learn. By sharing our experiences, we can all learn from each other.

My review of Spanish

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My review of Spanish

Ask a native English speaker what language they like to hear and you will get a wide variety of answers. But, ask native Spanish speakers and most will simply say "Spanish, of course." They genuinely enjoy their language and feel it is more expressive than any other.

I agree that it is a very expressive language. It has a warmth to it, it's alive. People seem to enjoy it more than many other languages. In literature, poetry and music it is a very beautiful and expressive language, probably much more so than English. It's filled with lots of colorful descriptive vocabulary.

People learning Spanish get way too hung up on verb conjugations and verb tenses. It's great to get them right, but Spanish speakers are very tolerant of mistakes. They are not particularly demanding of a learner with regards to pronunciation or grammar, and they appreciate someone speaking even a little Spanish.

Spanish is one of the easiest languages to learn, particularly if your native language is English. How it is written is easy to pick up. It is very regular and only has a couple of new letters or accent marks for you to learn. Reading it is very easy once you've mastered the basic sounds. You can read it aloud correctly right off the page and sound like you understand it even if you don't know a word! There aren't many languages like that. And, there are lots of cognates with English, so a lot of the vocabulary is already familiar. If your native language is another Romance language (French, Italian, Portuguese etc) or if you've already learned one of those to a reasonable level, then you're already more than halfway to learning Spanish.

Spanish is useful, which you can't say of too many languages. You will find use for it in the US, Central and South America and Europe. The opportunities to use Spanish once you've started learning it are everywhere, almost as much so as English.

One of the interesting things about Spanish is the number of regional accents, even within the same country. No matter which accent you learn, there will always be some others that are a little difficult to understand at first. This is true even for native speakers! It's fun to watch two native-speaking people from very different regions with different accents meet and try to have a conversation. They both quickly realize that they have trouble understanding each other and they have to find the common ground between them and simplify what they are saying. I've seen this happen and then asked one of them later about it. I said "I could barely understand that guy," and they replied "yeah, me too"!

I think anyone could benefit from learning some Spanish. As dominant as English is, the whole Western hemisphere is filled with Spanish speaking countries!