Everybody who is starting out learning the language looks for some easy Spanish to try and get to grips with it. Often they are amazed to discover that learning Spanish is much easier that they ever imagined. Spanish and English share common roots with Latin in particular, and to a lesser degree, Greek also. This means that a lot of the words simply need a different suffix from English to become Spanish – and they will have the exact same meaning as well! Doesn't that sound like easy Spanish? It does and it is.
Take "plastic," for example. That word is "plastico" in Spanish. Well, you were looking for easy Spanish, and it surely couldn't get any easier than this. When English-speaking people think about learning Spanish, they usually view it as one big problem. "No hay problema", and if you can't figure out what that Spanish phrase means, then you do have a problem. The best way to learn Spanish quickly is to learn all the easy words first. The grammar is kind of different, but that will follow naturally. Take for example the phrase mentioned above: "no hay problema." It literally means, "not there is problem." It shouldn't take long for you to adjust to this way of thinking and make that, "there's no problem," its English equivalent."
However, let's work with the easy Spanish words first. It's the suffixes that change for many words, and it appears to be a regular thing as well. As in the case of "plastic" becoming "plastico," many other words ending in "ic" change to "ico" in Spanish. Clásico, cómico, histérico, metódico, técnico are all cases where you should have no difficulty in guessing what the English counterparts are. It's not just the "ic" ending words either. Easy Spanish gets even easier when you bring in all the other groups, such as "abundant" becoming "abundante" in Spanish, "monument" becomes "monumento," "pianist" becomes "pianista," "indication" becomes "indicación," "patent" becomes "patente," "religious" becomes "religioso."
Easy Spanish can be pretty easy at times. How do you spell, "central"? You spell it quite simply as, "central." The pronunciation is different from the English (you emphasize the "a" and not the "n"), but it's amazingly alike and certainly a good example of easy Spanish. There are others too. Other instances include words suchas, "animal," "noble," "admirable," and "director." Most of the times, these kind of words have the same meaning as in English, but sometimes they can be a little bit different. For instance, the English word, "conductor" when applied to a person normally conjures up a picture of someone leading an orchestra. However, in Spanish, it means the driver of a car.
Many times, easy Spanish needs a little bit of lateral thinking. A car is "coche" in Spanish. You may think at first glance that it's completely different from the English language, but think back to the time of highwaymen traveling the English countryside looking to hold up a coach. Coaches were the cars of those days, and the Spanish word, "coche" is just the modern counterpart.
There certainly are Spanish words that bear no resemblance to their English counterparts, but that is to be expected; or else Spanish and English would end up as the same language. Easy Spanish definitely exists, and it's easy to pick it up too. You really can learn Spanish easy, fast, and systematicly by looking up the similarities between English and Spanish terms.
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