I’ve heard it for years, probably ever since I was a child, probably from the very first Spanish speaker I ever met: Spanish is far easier than English. Easier in what way?
For starters, the letter sounds are always exactly they way they sound in the alphabet. Isn’t that nice! No throughs and thoughts and toughs in Spanish! Maybe not, but ask a Spanish speaker to go over a list of words beginning in b and v or that have internal b’s and v’s.
Mhmm…
Words with a d are doozies, too. “No, that word should sound like /d/ as in dog, and the other should sound like /th/ as in this, and the other d should like taking the /d/ as in dog and smushing it somewhat angrily together with the /th/ as in this.
“Yes, perfect! See? Isn’t Spanish easy? But a little less /th/ next time and a bit more /d/.”
And how do you pronounce the letter y? Well, it depends. It can depend on what country you’re from or from where you learned Spanish, it can depend on whether your Spanish is more Latin American or not, it can depend on whether there’s an Indian language influence, and it can depend on whether or not it’s Thursday.
That last one I just made up.
Or did I?
These are just letter sounds. We haven’t gotten into vocabulary at all. The verbs–wow. Spanish conjugates verbs within an inch of their lives, then goes ahead and takes the last inch for good measure.
But fear not! All the regular verbs are conjugated identically, so once you’ve learned one regular verb, you’ve learned them all. Piece of cake.
Guess what? The verbs you will be using on a daily basis to do the majority of communication in Spanish, you guessed it, they’re irregular verbs! (I think I just heard an evil laugh in the background.)
They say Spanish is so easy, but have they given English a fair chance? Even children can speak English!
Juan David 