Why do foreigners find Spanish grammar hard?

Spanish or Castilian is a Romance language that originated in the Iberian Peninsula of Europe and today, it is a global language with nearly 500 million native speakers, mainly in Spain and the Americas! It is the world’s second-most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese, the most taught language after English and French, and the world’s fourth-most spoken language overall after English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindi.

A part of the Ibero-Romance group of languages of the Indo-European language family, which evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in Iberia after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, the oldest Latin texts with traces of Spanish are found in mid-northern Iberia texts from the 9th century. The first systematic written use of the language is found to have happened in Toledo, a prominent city of the Kingdom of Castile, in the 13th century. Modern Spanish was then taken to the viceroyalties of the Spanish Empire beginning in 1492, most notably to the Americas, as well as territories in Africa and the Philippines.

As a descendant of Latin, Spanish has one of the smaller degrees of difference from it (about 20%) besides Sardinian and Italian. Around 75% of modern Spanish vocabulary is derived from Latin, including Latin borrowings from Ancient Greek. Its vocabulary has been influenced by Basque, Iberian, Celtiberian, Visigothic, and other neighbouring Ibero-Romance languages besides having a large influence from Arabic, (8% of vocabulary has Arabic lexical roots, having developed during the Al-Andalus era in the Iberian Peninsula). Additionally, it has absorbed vocabulary from other languages, particularly other Romance languages such as French, Italian, Mozarabic, Portuguese, Galician, Catalan, Occitan, and Sardinian, as well as from Quechua, Nahuatl, and other indigenous languages of the Americas.

Spanish is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, and it is also used as an official language by the European Union, the Organization of American States, the Union of South American Nations, the Community of Latin American and the Caribbean States, the African Union and many other international organizations. However, despite its large number of speakers, Spanish does not feature prominently in scientific writing and technology, though it is better represented in the humanities and social sciences. Spanish is the third most used language on the internet after English and Russian.

It would be an injustice to classify a beautiful language such as Spanish to be foreign in its own turf, such as South America, Latin America, Spain, Mexico and neighbouring countries where it has a great mutual influence. The countries or people foreign to Spanish could be Asian countries, Africa, Russia, Gulf etc

In general, people get stumped at the mere mention of “grammar”, but it’s worth mentioning what grammar can teach you in minutes might just take days to figure out by immersion alone. Agreed, studying Spanish grammar will not make you fluent, but it will certainly contribute to helping you reach a conversational level by guiding you to frame sentences appropriately.

People talking things like,”I didn’t learn grammar as a child, and yet I still learned to speak. Therefore, I do not need to study grammar as an adult”, forget the fact that as an adult you have a higher mental capacity, and learning some grammar is easy and will be a big help to you.

For most people, the primary goal is not to become a grammar expert, but to be able to have good communication skills and speak Spanish conversationally and so anyways less emphasis is laid on Grammar despite it being a backbone to good sentence formation supporting spoken Spanish!

Challenges in Grammar

Spanish has many rules to follow and they have long lists of exceptions! Spanish has a more difficult grammar than English, because of its conjugations, tenses and above all, subjunctive

Commonly used slangs 

Depending on the city, a few slang words or expressions or things that are repeated may often vary and might be difficult to understand.

Gender

In Spanish, genders are often attached with no rhyme or reason: In many cases, you are simply expected to remember if a word is masculine or feminine. If, for English speakers, themselves learning nouns that have a specific gender can be really hard, you can imagine the case with foreigners learning  Spanish! The gender of a noun affects words around it like adjectives and articles. Learning masculine and feminine articles eg: el gato = the (male) cat; la gata = female cat, is very important and tedious! Not because of difficulty level but because of multiple gender articles especially if your first/ native language does not use any. For example, Casa is female while sofá is masculine. After identification, the next step is to make sure that all the other adjectives surrounding the nouns agree. For example, to say “the house is pretty and clean”, you must remember that the house is feminine, therefore the adjectives also have to be feminine: la casa es bonita y limpia. And gender is important to Spanish: that can be really frustrating!

Grammar Agreement 

It’s extremely important that your conversation follows grammar agreements all the time. There are the rules and then there are exceptions! All feminine words end with “a“, right? Wrong! You need to get, perfectly familiar with the basics on feminine and masculine nouns.

Trying to remember the correct vocabulary, making sure all your adjectives agree with nouns they qualify in gender and number, and on top of all that, choosing between pretérito indefinido and imperfecto is enough to drive you crazy!

Vocabulary 

Not only that you are delegated with the daunting task of generating vocabulary to learn better for your own self, but, you also have to ensure the vocabulary words, follow all rules so you speak Spanish correctly. 

False Friends

Here’s when Spanish stumps you! You want to go to the library and you say librería! Nope, not right! That means a bookstore! You feel embarrassed about something and say estoy embarazada! Time to be more embarrassed because you just told someone that you’re pregnant!

Tensed with Tenses! Genuine problem ?

Spanish has four common past tenses with different meanings, as compared to English that has three different past tenses. Also, it’s a present tense in English that looks back but in Spanish, it’s a past tense looking forward to the present which creates subtle differences. If you want to sound fluent and more like a native, the use of different tenses is something you MUST learn.

Spanish has:

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.

(For the purposes of counting the number of verb forms here, the imperative has been included in its place)

Subjunctive 

This might be one of the hardest things to get. After being bombarded with tens of new tenses (in the indicative), you learn there’s a whole other dimension of tenses called the subjuntivo. Use it when… you want to express a desire or a doubt, when one action depends on another or following some fixed expressions with “que“. The uses are many and understanding them is really difficult. The future perfect subjunctive 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!.

The subjunctive is used more frequently in Spanish, in most dialects, but it’s not a big difference. 

Irregular Verbs

Spanish has many irregular verbs that make your Spanish learning journey harder. It almost looks like irregular verbs are the Spanish language’s revenge for English’s impossible spellings. Many common verbs are irregular, so you are likely to use them in everyday conversations. This makes mastering the most common irregular verbs crucial. There’s nothing much you can do but remember them, however, memorizing so many is quite an overwhelming task.

Phonemic stress.

Spanish is a language that engages in phonemic stress not just with its two r’s but also in the usage of words. Depending on which syllable you stress, the meaning of a word changes: for example canto (I sing) vs cantó (he/she sang)

Order of Adjectives 

While the sentence structure(“Subject, Verb, Object” (SVO)) is similar to English, which is half the battle won but differences like adjective order can really stump you. Some adjectives when placed before the noun, give the sentence a subjective meaning, perhaps an opinion, but when placed after the noun, give a factual or objective meaning!

Some adjectives go before a noun as a rule while some go after a noun. 

Demonstratives 

Three levels of demonstratives (este, ese, aquel), opposed to two in English (this, that) and one in French (ce, which is then combined with là and ici to specify).

The R and J and G Sounds

The Spanish jota and ge are two other sounds that can’t be found in English and such are the sounds that English speakers themselves find difficult – the “hard” pronunciation of the “j” (which you’ll find in Spain and Argentina but not in most Latin American countries or when spoken by non-natives where it’s a “h” sound).

Of course, if you’re Scottish, or a Welsh speaker that’s a familiar sound of course. But what about speakers alien to these languages? Say a Chinese, Japanese, Afghanistan or an Indian national? In these specific cases, only practice (and hard work) makes perfect. The ñ can be hard but most people can approximate it well enough to be understood. The real problem for English speakers learning Spanish comes from the two “r” phonemes. Spanish has both trilled and tapped r, which are phonemic – the Spanish ere and erre! 

Producing either of them is hard and differentiating between the “pero” and “perro” can be a struggle for even a C1 level Spanish student. On the contrary the sound is one that the native speakers have been perfecting all their lives and it’s the reason it sounds so effortless for them. 

Native Dialect 

When you find yourself amidst a group of natives all the words sound as if they’re one big long song and you end up scratching your head trying to figure out where one ends and the other begins! Accents from different countries add to the misery of understanding what someone is saying. Sometimes, letters and sounds are omitted or pronounced in a different way!

Ser and Estar

A very interesting and amusing fact is that while in English, we literally have only one verb for “to be” Spanish displays an exhibit of complicated ser and estar! This is what most of us may miss or may not find it such a big deal while learning so many other important topics in Spanish, but to native speakers, the misuse of ser and estar sounds really very strange.

Por y Para

Some people simplify por and para as using it like “to” and “for”, but there are other complicated uses for these two conjunctions, too, that needs to be understood well.

Verbs 

The Spanish verb system is so complex that it makes Spanish a bit more impossible to destroy. There are about 17 different verb forms, including both tenses and moods of which 14 are in regular use.

Firstly, if you’ve already learnt any Romance Language previously, Spanish becomes much easier to learn. However, a natural flow in Spanish comes only with time. So, remember, it’s just about having to put time, effort,  commitment, and hard work in and learn the challenging grammar. As you study, you will notice some patterns that will make your life easier.