Everyone who is starting in the language looks for some easy Spanish to try and get to grips with it. Often they are amazed to find that learning Spanish is a lot easier that they thought it was. Spanish and English have common roots with Latin especially, and to a lesser extent, Greek also. The implications are that a lot of the words simply require a different suffix from English to become Spanish – and they will mean exactly the same thing as well! Doesn’t that sound like easy Spanish? It does and it is.
Take “plastic,” for an instance. That word becomes “plastico” in Spanish. Well, you were looking for easy Spanish, and it surely can’t get any easier than this. When English-speaking people think about learning Spanish, they start to perceive it as one big problem. “No hay problema”, and if you can’t figure out what that Spanish phrase means, then you do have one. The best way to learn Spanish quickly is to learn all the easy words first. The grammar is a little different, but that will follow naturally. Take for instance the phrase mentioned above: “no hay problema.” It literally means, “not there is problem.” It won’t take long for you to adjust to this way of thinking and make that, “there’s no problem,” its English equivalent.”
However, let us stick with the easy Spanish words first. It’s the endings that are different for many instances, and it seems 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 little difficulty in figuring what the English counterparts are. It’s not just the “ic” ending words either. Easy Spanish becomes 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 very 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 conveniently similar and definitely a good instance of easy Spanish. There are others too. Other instances are words like, “animal,” “noble,” “admirable,” and “director.” Usually, these types of words have the exact meaning as in English, but at times they can be somewhat different. For example, the English word, “conductor” when applied to a person usually describes someone leading an orchestra. However, in Spanish, it means the driver of a car.
Many times, easy Spanish needs some form of creative thinking. A car is “coche” in Spanish. You may think at first glance that it’s nothing like the English language, but think back to the days 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 hold no resemblance to their English equivelents, but that’s to be expected; or else Spanish and English would end up as the same language. Easy Spanish certainly exists, and it’s easy to learn too. You truely can learn Spanish easy, quickly, and systematicly by looking up the similarities between English and Spanish terms.