What are the most common challenges that students face when learning Spanish?

Answer 1

1. Spanish has more verb conjugations. For example, I talk, you talk, they talk, we talk all have the same ending in English vs. yo hablo, tú hablas / usted habla, ellos hablan, nosotros hablamos which are all different in Spanish.
2. Adjectives usually go after the noun instead of before. In English, "the red house" becomes "la casa roja" in Spanish.
3. Related to the second point, all nouns in Spanish are either masculine and feminine which means all of the associated adjectives/articles have a masculine or feminine form as well. In English, everything is neutral -- "THE RED house" is the same as "THE RED car" and the speaker can ignore masculine vs. feminine. But in Spanish, the first is feminine and so it is "LA casa ROJA" whereas the second is masculine "EL auto ROJO".

Despite the above, Spanish is a much more straightforward language than English as far as pronunciation. There are only 5 distinct vowel sounds (a,e,i,o,u) for all words. Futhermore, for the most part, it is a phonetic language which means you write it almost exactly as you speak it. Think of the nightmare for foreign students who have to figure out why "though", "threw" and "thru" are all pronounced the same!!

Answer 2

I believe one of the biggest challenges people have when learning Spanish is distinguishing the difference between SER & ESTAR. SER being used for location and ESTAR being used for location. They are also used for other things but I find these to be the foundation for learning Spanish. It's like a house if you don't have the foundation of the house built first then everything else will crumble.

Answer 3

Some of the most common challenges that students face when learning Spanish include, a) when to use Por and when to use Para, b) learning the gender of words, and c) Spanish tenses (there are 16 in total)! Of course with practice, their Spanish will get better with time.