Language is a complex phenomenon that separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. It is known to be the golden key that enables us to express our feelings and thoughts, and simultaneously provides us with the ability to cross cultural boundaries. While several regions of the brain are dedicated to its processing and management, according to the twentieth century's leading linguist, Noam Chomsky, the mechanism of language acquisition formulates from innate processes. In other words, we are genetically programmed to learn and implement this specialized form of communication.
Learning any language can present certain challenges for people. Whether your native tongue is English, Portuguese or Chinese, there may have been obstacles along the path of acquisition. Certainly, the challenges of language learning are different depending on whether it is the mother tongue or a foreign language. In this paper, we will assess the challenges of learning Spanish for non-native speakers.
Spanish is not considered to be one of the more difficult languages to learn, but that doesn't classify it as being easy, either. Like any foreign language, this romance tongue has its challenges to overcome. Some of the more common of these are verb conjugation, nouns and adjectives with gender and count, along with preposition use.
The first notorious challenge in learning Spanish is the management of prepositions. It is said that a person is not fluent in a language unless they know how to manage its prepositions. Spanish is no exception. The two most difficult prepositions for most foreign speakers are "por" and "para" which mean "for". Since this cannot be summarized even in a few pages, how about just a little sample? If I want to say to my little sister, "I'm very happy for you", I construct "Me alegra mucho por ti". But, if I want to say to my teacher, "Here, this is for you", I would utter "Aqui, esto es para usted". Changing the personal pronoun from "ti" to "usted" had nothing to do with the distinction between "por" and "para", it has to do with the action.
Moving on to the next challenging of the bunch, nouns and adjectives with gender and count can be a headache for native English speakers, as the articles and modifying adjectives must be in agreement with the noun. Spanish categorizes all nouns into either feminine or masculine, and singular or plural. The corresponding definite or indefinite article that is employed with a particular noun depends on the gender and count of the noun, as does the adjective which modifies it.
For instance, the word "book" in Spanish is "libro", a masculine-singular noun. In this case it relies on the definite article "el libro" and the indefinite article "un libro". When in its plural form, it changes its definite article to "los libros" and its indefinite article to "unos libros". The general rule is that a noun which ends in the letter "o" is masculine, while ending in the letter "a" indicates feminine.
Now let's examine another example. The word "apple" in Spanish is "manzana", a feminine-singular noun. As such, it uses the definite article "la manzana" and the indefinite article "una manzana". In its plural form, it changes its definite article to "las manzanas" and its indefinite article to "unas manzanas".
One of the most well-known exceptions is the word "agua", a masculine-singular noun ending in the letter "a" which uses the definite article "el agua" in its singular form, and "los aguas" in plurality. However, when using the word descriptively in context, it uses adjectives in the feminine form. So, if we want to say "the cold water" we use "el agua fria". Notice the use of the masculine article with a feminine adjective following the noun, not so standard.
Adjectives typically modify a noun at the tail and not at the head of a phrase. In other words, we say "las manzanas rojas" for "the red apples" and not "las rojas manzanas". As one can see, correctly learning noun gender and adjective use has its challenges. Still, we shall skip examining nouns that end in consonants or other vowels; memorization is the name of that game.
Now it's time for the grand finale and the greatest challenge in learning Spanish verb conjugation. Spanish verbs are separated into three separate categories, each with its own conjugation of tense. These are "ar", "er" and "ir" verbs, of which, the latter two categories consist of some irregular conjugations, while all three categories have a majority of verbs which conjugate regularly.
Here is an example of an "ar" verb, the category that has only regular verbs, and as such the easiest to manage. The verb "hablar" means "to speak". In the present tense we conjugate it to "yo hablo/I speak", "tu hablas/you speak", "ella habla/she speaks" or "usted habla/you speak", "nosotros hablamos/we speak", "vosotros hablais/you speak" and "ellas hablan/they speak" or "ustedes hablan/you speak". You may have noticed that there are four different personal pronouns used to define the person "you". The particular use depends on whether the speaker is referring to one person in the familiar or formal tone, "tu" and "usted", or making reference to more than one person in the familiar or formal tone, "vosotros" and "ustedes", respectively. Aside from establishing context or marking emphasis, personal pronouns are typically not required in Spanish.
All verbs in the "ar" category use the same terminations for conjugation in each tense. Notice the reliance on six different conjugated verb forms which only represent the present simple tense. For each of Spanish's 17 different verb tenses, there are new conjugated forms that a speaker needs to remember. This equates to 86 different conjugations for every verb, as some of the forms are repeated in each tense. In order to grasp the scope of difficulty, the English language typically uses only five conjugated forms with the use of the auxiliary verb "to have" in order to accommodate all the tenses.
In order to avoid more confusion, we shall forego the review of irregular verbs, as they provide even more challenge in conjugation. From this we can easily comprehend some of the challenges in learning Spanish. Although the alphabet is phonetically consistent with only 22 phonemes, the use of prepositions, management of nouns and adjectives with count and gender, along with verb conjugation often pose some of the greatest challenges in learning Spanish.