If you are a native English speaker and thinking of trying to learn the Spanish language, go for it. Absolutely go for it! Spanish is one of the easiest languages to learn because it is so similar to English. In fact, you don’t even have to know much Spanish at all to be able to pick up on the meaning of Spanish words as you read them due to the similarities of Spanish and English. Knowing this, you can take full advantage of an opportunity to learn a foreign language and following is a list of how you can use the similarities to learn Spanish faster.
1. Cognates are words that sound similar in both languages. Of course, there are many false cognates, or words that incorrectly sound as if they mean the same thing in both languages, but most of the time you will find the similarities of cognates to be most helpful. In fact, this might be the most useful bit of information of all when it comes to picking up on Spanish definitions of words quickly.
2.The Spanish alphabet is nearly exactly the same as the English alphabet, except that it contains a few more characters than that of the English one. The alphabet similarities make it especially easy to learn to write in Spanish and to learn the first basic Spanish translation words.
3. The sentence structure of both languages is similar as well. There are of course, a few differences, but the basic sentence structure is the same for both Spanish and English so a person is able to pick up the speech patterns of the Spanish language much more quickly.
4. Pronunciation of Spanish words is similar to several English words, except that the sounds are generally softer than the harsher, more hard sounding English words. Therefore, learning how to pronounce the Spanish alphabet is easier than trying to learn how to pronounce the alphabets of other languages and, once you have learned how to pronounce the letters, you are able to do things like look up a particular word in a Spanish word dictionary and be able to quickly know how to pronounce it.