Is learning Spanish or English more difficult?
Which second language is more difficult for the mono-lingual speaker to learn - Spanish or English?, Why?
For instance, as an ESL teacher, I know native English speakers use over twice the number of vowel sounds that native Spanish use. I believe this makes the pronunciation of English difficult for many students.
I am not sure of the best way to deal with the topic of English spelling. I've had many students come to me and say. They understand English but they need help with their writing. I understand this to mean that they are very confused about English spelling.
Please comment.
20 Answers
I think it is much harder to learn English, largely because it comes from a mixture of languages which leads to not only weird pronunciation, but to many more words. I doubt that learning how to conjugate in Spanish is any harder than learning to use modals and auxilliaries in English, and the main reason many English speakers have so much trouble with the subjunctive in Spanish is because they use it incorrectly in English. The prepositions seem to be a nightmare in both languages, but once again English has more of them and individual verbs tend to be use with more of them in ways which change their meaning. . .then there are phrasal verbs.
Spanish may have more conjugations, but its mechanics are much more straightforward. Only a native English speaker not able to get outside the language in terms of its complexity would think otherwise. I'm a native English speaker learning Spanish, but even I can see that...
I love this little poem to illustrate my point:
I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it's said like bed, not bead -
For goodness sake don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose -
Just look them up - and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart -
Come, come, I've hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive!
I'd mastered it when I was five!
Quoted by Vivian Cook and Melvin Bragg 2004, by Richard Krogh, in D Bolinger & D A Sears, Aspects of Language, 1981, and in Spelling Progress Bulletin March 1961, Brush up on your English.
In written form, I don't find Spanish very hard. It's a lot more phonetic than English (even though I can't pronounce like a native...), and the verbs have never been that hard for me. However, I have problems with comprehension because I don't hear Spanish speakers very often. As far as I can tell, English's main challenge is the pronunciation, since there are so many words that don't sound like they appear
My other native language is Mandarin Chinese, and I find it harder than either English or Spanish. There is no alphabet and absolutely no phonetic pronunciation; you have to memorize literally thousands of characters. Additionally, the grammar is very unstructured. The one easy part is the verbs; there are no conjugations.
Hello, Gerry!
As an English student, I do think we struggle mainly with pronunciation. I have never encountered a language in which spelling and pronunciation seem to be so separated worlds. I can understand written English pretty well, and although I still make lots of mistakes, actually I find English grammar easy enough.
Concerning to oral understanding, in my case it varies greatly depending on the person and the accent of the speaker. I can see some films and listen to the news getting almost everything, and the next day I come across a conversation between natives and I can barely catch a word, trapped between contractions, phrasal verbs and idioms.
I can speak, more or less, about simple issues, I can describe myself and say that I like where I live. But suddenly, I want to garnish a bit my speech and I can't. First, because I know a word but I can't figure out how to pronounce it. And second, because I just can't reproduce most of the sounds you produce, or if I do, I sound very ambiguous and blurred. And what is worse: I can't even differenciate some of them. I find it very hard to perceive the difference between dunce-dance, father-further, advise-advise, as-ass, filling-feeling, ... and so on. That makes me feel quite helpless.
We'll keep on working, though.
Technically, English is considered one of the hardest languages to learn, right up there with Arabic and some others. BUT as a native English speaker learning Spanish, the tenses and conjugations are killer.
In many, but not all, respects Spanish is comparatively easier than English and I say this as someone who has been brought up with English as my first language, despite having been born in Peru where I spent only the first 18 months -2 years of my life
Spanish is much more phonetical than English and this obviously makes spelling and pronouncing Spanish words much easier than English and I say this as someone whose level of spelling is generally very good.(Although you might not think so, at times, judging from my typing skills! lol)
However, where Spanish can be much more difficult is in the area of verb tenses and moods: eg indicative: present, future, conditional, simple past, imperfect, present and imperfect subjunctive and then you have all the compound verb forms eg perfect indicaitve, pluscuamperfecto etc....
There are at least 14 different verb conjugations. ( I think Lazarus may have previosuly mentioned there being at least 17 of them in one of his posts or a comment section, but I am not sure! )
However, at the end of the day, what is easy for some people to learn may be more complex for others.
Gerry, if any of your students have dyslexia thay are likely to find learning spelling something resembling a nightmare experience... like wading through a minefield at night 
I hope this helps 
In my opinion, i think spanish is more easier because in english, there's so much hard pronouncations but in spanish, it is eaiser. It is my 1st year learning spanish and I am speaking like a pro! The spanish pronouncation is more eaiser because all you are doing is just looking at the word and pronouncing it. I hope this help you with your decision! 
Agree about English being hard for non-natives, but for an English speaker learning Spanish as his first Latin language, all the verbs and moods would probably be a bigger challenge than pronunciation and spelling.
I am kind of biased in answering this because I am a native English speaker. I have found Spanish to be challenging, but definitely manageable if you really want to learn it. The most difficult thing for me is pronunciation and grammar rules. I think it comes down (in learning any language) to desire to learn and immersion in the language. Por ejemplo...I have a friend who moved to the U.S. from Mexico when he was 6 years old. He picked up English very quickly and easily, because he was immersed in it all the time and he needed to learn it in order to make it through the day.
also in spanish you have many reflexive verbs...to a lot of verbs you have to add me, te se, nos, se...me baño....se comen el almuerzo...for an english speaker that can be challenging as well...for some verbs you have to use the reflexive and for other ones no...it can make a gringo's head spin.
I am an english teacher here in Colombia. I was born and raised in the USA and lived there up until 11 months ago. English is obviously my first language and spanish is my second. I can understand how english can be difficult in certain extents. First off like everyone says, the pronunciation. Second off is sentence order. In spanish you can pretty much put any word you want in any part of the sentence and it's fine as opposed to english, there is a set order. Lastly I do think that english has a lot of auxiliaries that can be difficult for the spanish speaker. For example...in spanish you say...yo no se...if you translate it word for word it would be I no know...but the auxiliary in english is a must, otherwise it doesn't make any sense. However, as spanish being my second language, I think spanish is more difficult. As the previous person stated, for each verb there are 30 to 40 conjugations and when to use each conjugation can be extremely confusing....for example...why do you say this in spanish? mi papa estuvo en el hospital por 6 meses antes de que se muriera...se muriera??? why? Why can't you say cuando se murio? Spanish grammar has a lot of rules that simply don't make any sense. Many native spanish speakers just don't realize the complexity to it because it is their native language. English grammar is very simplistic when you get down to it. Spanish tends to be a much more expressive language than English. English tends to be direct and to the point and when Spanish speakers realize that they can't express themselves the same way in English as they can in Spanish, it becomes difficult to them. For example, how many ways are there to say I love you in Spanish? Like 5 at least as opposed to English, just one. Also, everything in spanish is a definite article. For example...a mi no me gusta LA comida mexicana....in english you say I dont like mexican food...if you say I dont like the mexican food in english youre talking about a specific mexican food...or another one....in spanish you say LA Vida es buena...in english you say life is good...when speaking in general terms in spanish, everything becomes a definite article as opposed to english. You only use the for specific things....and lastly, gender agreements...in spanish you have el, la, los, las...and some nouns are irregular...ie la radio, el mapa....etc...there are exceptions...so id say while english isnt the easiest to learn, but when you compare it to spanish, Id say english is less challenging
How did you become an ESL teacher? This is what I am attempting to do.
There are things that are easy and hard about both languages, but I think it may be harder for some non-native English speakers to learn English than for a native English speaker to learn Spanish. I think it also depends on what your first language is. I imagine that coming from a Latin-based language, it's hard to learn English. If you're first language is German, probably not as hard (this is an assumption I'm making). English is considered a hard language to learn, although certainly not as hard as say Arabic or Mandarin. Spanish is considered one of the easiest languages to learn for native English speakers.
Many people already mentioned the hard things about the Spanish language, which as a beginner Spanish student I haven't encountered yet (but I did in French, so I have a good idea), and I think the hardest part about English is the:
- Pronunciation - Sounds you don't have or use regularly in your native language. Words that sound the same and are spelled differently (right and write). Words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently with no accent written above to give you a hint (close the door, you are very close to me). As a side note, I love the accents above the letters, makes life very easy 
.
- Spelling - English has a lot of words with silent letters. Like "through", "muscle" and "subtle". This is also true about French, and indeed that was one of the hardest things for me, personally. My French spelling was, and still is, terrible.
- Sentence Structure - cfm1181 covered that one better than I could.
I think the best analogy I've heard from a non-native speaker learning English is that they feel like they're trying to speak with a bunch of marbles in their mouth.
Now, I speak English, so this is only my assumption. A lot of stuff you hear about learning language is subjective, since we all speak different languages. But, it's good to hear, because it's good to know you're not alone
I think learning Euskara is harder.
As a native Turkish I would say Spanish is easier to pronounce but harder to learn the grammar. So if you go and live in Spain I think it would be easy or if you are a hard working language student. English grammar is far much easier than Spanish one.
