Easy Spanish

Everyone 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 it can be a lot easier that they ever imagined.

Spanish and English share common roots with Latin in particular, and to a lesser degree, Greek as well. This means that many of the words simply need a different ending from English to become Spanish – and they will mean exactly the same thing too! Does that sound like easy Spanish? It does and it is.

Take "plastic," for example. That word becomes "plastico" in Spanish. Well, you wanted easy Spanish, and it surely can't get any easier than this. When English-speaking people think about learning Spanish they start to see it as one big problem. No hay problema, and if you can't work out what that Spanish phrase means, then you do have one.

The best way to get to grips with easy Spanish is to learn all the easy words first. The grammar is a little different, but that will follow naturally. Take the phrase mentioned above: "no hay problema." It literally means, "not there is problem." It won't take long for anyone to adjust to this way of thinking and make that, "there's no problem," its English equivalent."

However, let's stick with the easy Spanish words first. It's the endings that change in many cases, and it tends to be a regular thing too. As in the example of "plastic" becoming "plastico," many other words ending in "ic" change to "ico" in Spanish. Clásico, cómico, histérico, metódico, técnico are all examples where you should have little difficulty in guessing what the English equivalent terms are.

It's not just the "ic" ending words either. Easy Spanish get's 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."

There are even better ones too. 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 delightfully similar and certainly a good example of easy Spanish.

There are others too. Examples include words like, "animal," "noble," "admirable," and "director." Usually these kind of words have the same meaning as in English, but sometimes they are a little bit different. The English word, "conductor" applied to a person usually conjures up a picture of someone leading an orchestra. In Spanish it means the driver of a car or other vehicle.

Sometimes easy Spanish needs a little bit of lateral thinking. A car is "coche" in Spanish. You may think at first glance that it's nothing like the English, but think back to the days of highwaymen roaming 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 equivalent.

There certainly are Spanish words that bear no resemblance to their English counterparts, but that's to be expected; otherwise they would be the same language. Easy Spanish certainly exists, and it's easy to learn too. Go on, try it!