Learning Spanish top challenges chosen by our Spark Staff

Spanish is said to be one of the easiest languages to learn and we at SparkSpanish dont for one moment disagree with this.  The pronunciation is phonetic making it easy to read words once you know the sound structure and its vocabulary is very similar to other Romance languages and is also quite similar to English.  Also its articles and verb structure on the whole are much easier to grasp for Spanish language learners than say German or Dutch.

However we decided it would be fun to focus this article on the challenges of learning Spanish, so we asked our Guiri (colloquial Spanish term for non Spaniards) members of our Spark team what were the hardest parts of learning Spanish.  The levels of our team vary from beginner to advanced so our top 3 Spanish challenges encompass all levels.

1.) Past simple tense: whereas English has one form Spanish has two.  The indefinido and imperfecto form not only add extra combinations one has to know but also the past changes for each person (I, you, we etc…), meaning for example whereas walk in the past in English has only one form “walked”, the Spanish equivalent “andar” has 12 (6 each for each person for both indefinido and imperfecto).

2.) Speed of delivery: Most of our learners of Spanish at Spark Spanish complain how fast the locals speak and they are justified to so as according to studies by the time magazine, Spanish is the second fastest language spoken language blowing the socks of it Germanic counterparts (Dutch, German, English etc..).

3.) Subjunctive: among many Spanish language learners the “subjuntivo” is known as the bane of their learning because just when you think you are getting somewhere with the tenses, your Spanish teacher throws the subjunctive at you “ouch!”  The subjunctive which broadly speaking is used: for the “uncertain future”, after certain set verb forms/constructions and in conditional sentences is a very complex verb form to master.

Hope you enjoyed this blog post on learning Spanish.  Keep in touch with more via our Spark Facebook and Spanish Newsletter and please don’t hesitate to check out our online Spanish classes or check out all our Spanish Course information.