Why Do They Find It So Hard?
Why is it so difficult for the Spanish to learn English? English is the world’s most spoken language if you include the people who use it as their work language. When you take this into consideration, it is worrying how few Spanish master it.
A young Spanish university student explained her lack of mastery of the English language like this: ‘My English is almost non-existent. At school I never leaned anything but sentence grammar, and I was never given the opportunity to speak or listen to English. Although I have quite a few foreign friends I speak very little English with them. I’m ashamed of doing it because I know how bad it sounds. And many of my friends feel the same.’
Most of us who have attempted to learn a foreign language will recognise this feeling, and the less used you are to learning foreign languages the more difficult it is to take the step. But apart for the the individual people’s inhibitions there are other elements that make it especially difficult for the Spanish to pick up the English language.
English is a language of many sounds. More than average – as opposed to Spanish, which has less than average. The five Spanish vowels a-e-i-o-u are always pronounced the same and are always short. The same vowels exist in English, but they can all be pronounced differently, which means that the six vowels a-e-i-o-u-y become many more vowel sounds, in fact about fourteen. So we could say that the English ear has been more finely tuned right from the beginning than the Spanish. This difference between the languages can obviously cause big problems. For example, for a Spanish person the three words cat, cart and cut all sound exactly the same. And it goes without saying that this makes it extremely difficult to speak and understand English.
And the problem does not diminish if you try to get your message across in writing. Whereas Spanish is written as it is pronounced, with almost total concord between sound and letter, you can never be sure how a sound is represented ortographically in English.
Example: The word ‘fish’ could be spelled ‘ghoti’: ‘gh’ as in rough (f), ‘o’ as i women (i) and ‘ti’ as in station (sh). Right?
Mind you, it might help if the Spanish were more exposed to English on a daily basis. There are lots of English and American films and series on Spanish TV, but they are all dubbed into Spanish and thus don’t offer the opportunity to listen to English. And of course most radio stations play mainly Spanish language music, another potential source of exposure to English.
So struggle on with the Spanish language – it is no more difficult for you to learn that than it is for a Spanish person to learn English; and after all, we are in their country.