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Is Spanish hard to learn for English speakers?

Spanish is one of the easier languages for an English speaker — the US diplomats' language school puts it in its easiest category — but it is not evenly easy. The first weeks are genuinely gentle, and then the verbs arrive. This post measures both halves: why the start is kind, and exactly how much of everyday Spanish is verbs.

Updated 7 October 2026 · 3 min read

The easy start

Sounds. Spanish has 5 vowel sounds, against more than a dozen in most accents of English. There are a few sounds to learn — the trilled rr, the j — but nothing like the nasal vowels of French or Portuguese.

Spelling. Spanish spelling is, in Wikipedia's words, "fairly phonemic, especially in comparison to more opaque orthographies like English": once you know the rules, you can read aloud any word you see, and spell any word you hear. That makes reading and listening help each other from the first day.

Vocabulary. Many Spanish words are recognisable to an English speaker — problema, importante, hospital, música. And the most common words do a great deal of work: 95 word forms make up half of everything said in Spanish film and television dialogue. How that turns into weeks and months is in how long it takes to learn Spanish.

The hard middle: verbs

A Spanish verb changes its ending for who is doing it, when, and how certain the speaker is. English speak has four forms (speak, speaks, spoke, spoken); a regular Spanish verb has dozens, and the commonest verbs are the irregular ones.

Here is how much that matters in practice. We took six of the most common Spanish verbs — ser and estar (both "to be"), ir (to go), haber (to have, as an auxiliary; also "there is"), tener (to have) and hacer (to do, to make) — listed their forms by hand, and counted how many turn up among the 1,000 most common word forms of Spanish dialogue:

That is a floor: forms that could be something else — esta (this) against está (is), sé (I know, from saber), hecho (done, or a fact) — were left out. Six verbs, and roughly one word in twelve. Every one of those forms has to be recognised instantly, and several look nothing like their infinitive: fui and fue belong to both ser and ir, hay is haber, and voy is ir.

The two famous difficulties

Ser and estar. Spanish has two verbs for "to be": ser for what something is, and estar for how or where it is. Es aburrido is "he is boring"; está aburrido is "he is bored". The rule is simple to state and takes a long time to feel.

The subjunctive. Spanish verbs have a separate set of forms, the subjunctive, for wishes, doubts, commands and things not yet real: quiero que vengas, "I want you to come". English barely has one. It is used constantly in everyday speech.

So is Spanish hard?

Compared with other languages, Spanish is firmly on the easy side; the comparison is in the easiest languages to learn for English speakers. If you already speak Spanish and are thinking about Portuguese, Portuguese vs Spanish measures how much transfers.

The 1,000 most common Spanish words are free and in frequency order — verbs included — and can be downloaded as a printable PDF or a CSV for Excel or Anki. The Spanish course teaches the verb forms in the order you will meet them.

Sources

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