Basic Spanish: Similarities between English and Spanish

Obviously, almost the most common question or the most common thing that someone asks himself when he has decided to learn a new language is the following question: Is it hard?



So, in this case, if you have decided to learn Spanish, you're obviously wondering or are interested to know, if Spanish is a difficult language or not .


In my point of view, the difficulty of a language it's completely defined by the languages you already know. I'm from Mexico, so it's possible that learning Portuguese it's going to be a little more easy than someone from China. Or vice versa, let's say that I and a chinese friend want to learn Japanese. It's possible that he will pick up the language a little bit faster that I will because he's already familiarized with Asian Languages.

Languages are all a big gigantic family, almost all of them are brothers, sisters, cousins, distant cousins, fathers, mothers and grandpa's. There are two enormous families of languages that are predominant in the world: The Indo-European Family and the Sino-Tibetan Family.

You can find the Indo-European languages in America, Europe, Oceania and the Middle East, while you can find the Sino-Tibetan languages in East and South Asia.


Spanish, English, French, Russian, Hindi, Italian, German, Portuguese, Marathi, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Urdu, etc. They all are from the Indo-European family, so in a way they all are, brothers, sisters, cousins and distant cousins.
So in a way, Spanish and English are from the same family but we can't called them brothers.
From the Indo-European Family several groups of languages descend:
The Italic Languages where Latin emerge and from here, the famous Romance Languages arise, all of these languages are based on Latin and they are: Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, etc). All of these languages are direct brothers from one another, and if you already now one of them, you can learn another one without great difficulty. They have almost the same structure and they have similar vocabulary.


English descends from another group of languages called the Germanic Languages: Where you can find German, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, and many other, of course including English.
So they're both from the same family, but they are not from the same group, so I guess we can call them cousins, BUT!!!, they are not distant cousins, NOT AT ALL.

There's a big little thing that English and Spanish share with each other, and that little thing is LATIN!

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="295"] Latin is not dead[/caption]

Yes, I know that English is not a language based on Latin, but the Anglo-Saxon language was heavily exposed to Latin in three great moments of its history, The Conquest of the Roman Empire (When the romans conquered Britain), the Christianization of the English Kingdom and the Norman Conquest (When french soldiers, who spoke french, a language descended from Latin, attacked and conquered Britain for a long period of time).


So as you can see, English is not based in Latin, but I'm pretty sure that English is the Non-Romance language that has been exposed to Latin the most.
Don't believe me ? , well I'm going to put a little text that I already wrote above, but after that little text, I'm going to write the translation in Spanish, and almost every little similarity that you see in both texts it's because on a Latin based word or term.

English is not a language based on Latin, but the Anglo-Saxon language was heavily exposed to Latin in three great moments of it's history, The Conquest of the Roman Empire (When the romans conquered Britain), the Christianization of the English Kingdom and the Norman Conquest (When french, who spoke french, a language descended from Latin, attacked and conquered Britain for a long period of time).

El Ingles no es un lenguaje basado en Latin, pero este lenguaje Anglo-Sajon a estado fuertemente expuesto al Latin en tres grandes momentos de su historia, La Conquista del Imperio Romano (Cuando los romanos conquistaron Bretaña) la Cristinianización del Reino Ingles y la Invasion Normanda (Donde los franceses, quienes hablaban Francés, un lenguaje descendiente del Latin, atacaron y conquistaron Bretaña por un largo periodo de tiempo).

So as you can see, there are a lot of words and a lot of things that Spanish and English share despite not been from the same group of languages.  So truly, without knowing it, you already have good descent amount of Spanish vocabulary without even realize it.

If you read the two texts closely, you can see that the structure of English and Spanish it's similar but they differ in certain aspects, but you can learn them without big problem. I will talk about these aspects in a next post, so stay tuned.

Thanks for reading :)