Spanish or English, which is harder to learn?
What is generally more difficult, learning Spanish when you are fluent in English or learning English when you are fluent in Spanish?
12 Answers
With all things being equal, I think the English language is more difficult than Spanish. That is just my personal opinion. Check this out. very helpful.
I am an English speaker learning Spanish and in real life have only met one American who might know more Spanish than I do. I have to admit it makes me very angry when Spanish speakers sit up and say that English is so easy compared to Spanish when the ones who say this cannot speak much English at all, and what English they do speak is far worse than my worst of Spanish days. Okay let us be honest. Spanish has got English on the verbs...maybe...except that English speakers who really buckle down and want to learn Spanish learn the verbs, I am one of them...but my husband, bless his heart, he still struggles with different tenses of English verbs, and most Spanish speakers I know only stay in present tense, be it English or Spanish. No one says "lo haré" around here. I have probably helped teach my neighbors their own verbs because I use the right tense when necessary, most of the time. If I do make a mistake I know that I have made one.
With that said, the Spanish verb system is so complex that it makes Spanish a bit more impossible to destroy. This in turn makes English more difficult because even Spanish slang follows conjugation rules. For example, you cannot break apart "quería" as in "I used to want," but in English you can say "I didn't used to." I will bet money that no one in my neighborhood would understand that phrase, minus my husband who has made great efforts to speak like a native and started learning at the age of 19. Now how would we go about explaining to a Spanish speaker what that phrase means? But yet it is a very necessary phrase, and it is pretty basic too...even if it is not exactly "correct."
A verb system, to me, makes a language easier to learn.
The English language is filled with too many broken rules that do not seem broken at all to natives, and it has far too many exceptions. English is more difficult.
Learning Spanish would be much easier for a native speaker of another Romance language, and maybe even Slavic people.
However, native speakers of Germanic languages might find Spanish a bit more distant than English, since English is, after all, a Germanic language.
So I guess my conclusion is that the best way to find a less biased answer to this question would be to ask a person from Asia (East Asia or the Middle East) who's had to learn both English and Spanish. It wouldn't work with any other part of the world because of the taint of colonization. 
Well, I would say Spanish has more "fine print": more grammar rules that make no real sense, then you have the spelling rules, accents, all these tenses that don't exist in English. It is a beautiful language that is so vast! Then add the regionalisms and we are talking about another whole beast!
I think it depends on your situation. For me, not having grammar in school made it a little but more difficult (but not impossible) when learning Spanish and some of the finer grammatical aspects. They are two languages that have much in common so coming from one and learning the other is I would say overall easier than being a native Mandarin speaker and trying to learn Spanish or English if that makes any sense. That idea of language distance...
So basically... you want to know if Spanish speakers had more trouble learning English as a second language... than English speakers had learning Spanish? But an English speaker who learned (is learning) Spanish ..can't speak for a Spanish native learning English, and vice versa? So how does one answer this? Haha.
I know this question has already been answered but I am not concerned with being chosen as the best answer I simply want to approach it a different way
Phonetically: Spanish is much easier than English to pronounce because it is a phonetical language and with the exception of the h that you don't pronounce, for example as in: Hablo español, the g sound which is more gutteral or sounds that are distinctly different eg the ñ sound which is fairly easy to learn, most Spanish words sound as they are spelt making it one of the easiest languages in the world to speak.
Grammatically, however, this is where English is more straightforward There is only one verb meaning 'to be' in English whereas in Spanish you have (need) to learn both verbs estar and ser and learn how and when to use each one appropriately if you wish to speak Spanish really well!
There are about 17 different verb forms, including both tenses and moods of which 14 are in regular use; The future perfect subunctive is not used in everyday communications (but mostly in legal documents and literary works) the present subjunctive is used in its place when indicating a future meaning! For the purposes of counting the number of verb forms here, the imperative has been included in its place.
Simple tenses, indicative form: 1 present, 2 future, 3 conditional, 4 imperfect, 5 preterite/simple past. Moods:1 present subjunctive, 2 imperfect subjunctive
Compound tenses: 1 perfect indicative eg has sido 2 pluscuamperfecto 3 preterito anterior 4 imperative 5 Potencial compuesto 6 Moods: Perfecto de subjunctvo 7 pluscuamperfecto de subjunctivo.
I have used the book Barrons 501 Spanish verbs 7th edn as the basis for listing these verbs but I have called them verb forms and listed the subjunctive as a mood ! They still need to be learnt
Summing up, In my experience, tthere is a lot more to learn when learning Spanish grammar and this includes learning masculine and feminine articles eg: el gato = the (male) cat; la gata = female cat. These gender articles are not used in English but are used in Spanish, French, Portuguese and most Latin based languages. (I am not sure if this includes Romanian)...Also, adjectives must agree with the nouns they qualify (describe) in gender (ie: male/female ) and in number.
I hope this helps 
I can't say about Spanish because it is native to me, I think it's no use asking natives of the two languages which one is harder, but I can tell you that French is considerably more difficult than English, in my personal experience, even though I just reached the 3rd level out of 14, French vowels are very difficult to master, their R is the worst nightmare come true, and even tohugh it is a Romance language and grammar is similar, it still didn't make it any easier, I keep reading comments saying that if you alredy speak a Romance language it'll be a cinch to pick up another one, but no, in this case it won't, Enlgish was easier.
I just wrote a long-winded answer to a similar question.
Executive summary: it's hard to say. Probably English, but it's not that much harder.
I have asked this question many times while living here in Mexico. The answer I always get from native Spanish speakers is that Spanish is much harder to learn than English.
Consider the issues. In English the pronunciation is harder as it is not phonetic. This is the biggest complaint about learning English. In Spanish each verb has over 100 different form compared to less than 10 in English. All nouns are masculine of feminime compared to nuetral in English. Then you have matching on gender and number, etc.
I agree that Spanish is harder than English.
I've been volunteering as an ESL instructor for about two years, and it has been my experience that, in general, Spanish is the more internally coherent language to teach. It has a more complex verb structure, but it is very consistent.
Just from my own personal experience, it seems to me that Spanish is easier to learn for an English speaker than the other way around.
See, according to me I don't think that any language is difficult or hard.
See it goes like this-
Lets say a person named 'A' is speaking English from his childhood then he will find English easier and if someone is speaking Spanish then he will find Spanish easier
Hope this helps you
