Spanish vs English: Differences and Similarities

Spanish is a roman language and is a part of Indo- European language family. It is related closely to Portuguese and Italy and forms a major language with 400 million speakers in Spain, USA and Latin America. Fortunately for people who are learning Spanish and can speak English has added benefits because they both share similarities among making it easy for English speaking people.

• The primary thing is that they both use roman alphabet where that knowledge helps to build phonological and phonemic foundation.
• Secondly, 40% of the words in English are related to words in Spanish with similar appearance, sound and meaning.
• Both languages even share a similar structure for sentences and also learning to write and read makes use of same basic processes such as decoding, fluency, writing mechanics, phonemic awareness and comprehension.

How Spanish is different from English

• In case of Spanish, one identifies gender article, singular, plural and adjective but this is not done in English.
• Spanish have more heavily varied language than English about verb.
• Latin derived words in English tends to be formal than in English.
• The accent of Spanish gives different meaning of the words used in sentences and the meaning of words depends on the position of their usage.
• English vowels and dipthong’s are 5 in each. Where as in Spanish vowels are 12 in number and dipthong’s are eight.
• The vowels take an acute accent with an additional letter.
• The Spanish phonological system is different from English in the aspects of sentence stress and vowel sounds.

Similarities between Spanish and English

• Both languages have a similar grammar structure based on the tense
• Though the basic structure of the sentences are same the other functions change the positions as do the adjectives.
• Vocabulary has some similarities where both share Latin influence.
• Also they share few words in common.

Spanish has strong comparability between the spelling and sound of the word in English. The irregularity of English in this respect causes problems in predictability when Spanish learners write their first word. Spanish has only 3 double letter combinations while English has 5 times as many.

By keeping these differences and similarities in mind Spanish learning English speaking language learners to pay close attention to the spoken and written errors. Once English speaking learners understand these patterns they begin to apply them to on their own to situations.

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