5 Ways Spanish is the same as English

Save Time By Knowing The Similarities. Here's another time-saving tip. -- Save time by leveraging your knowledge of English and becoming aware of the many ways Spanish is similar to English.

1 - Thousands of Similar Words (Cognates)

This is the biggest plus in learning Spanish -- an abundance of cognates. You can get entire books that give you long lists of Spanish cognates and include usage tips and important warnings about false cognates or false friends as they are often called.

And there are many word endings in Spanish that have corresponding endings in English. You can immediately know hundreds of Spanish words by knowing these word endings. When you see a Spanish word with the ending ación that is a word that corresponds to the English word with the ending of ation. And words with the ending ology are the Spanish words that end like this: ologia. You can read more about Spanish cognates here.

2 - Spanish Letters Or Character Set Are Similar To English

We all realize many languages use a character set that is completely different and removed from the English character set we're used to. -- Not so with Spanish. Spanish, for the most part, uses the letters written and shaped exactly as the letters we've been using all our lives. This is a big similarity and a big plus and assistance for us as we learn Spanish. As most of you know there do exist some special characters with accent marks but not like the differences you'd see studying Japanese or Russian.

3 - Word Order And Sentence Structure Often Similar To English

For the most part Spanish word order and sentence structure are very similar to English. There can be some differences -- for example, in English the adjective comes before the noun and in Spanish the adjective comes after the noun. But when comparing Spanish to other languages its word order is similar to English.

4 - Spanish Parts Of Speech

Spanish has all the parts of speech you learned when you learned English in school. Spanish has nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc. And they work in a similar way. And Spanish makes plurals like English by adding s to the end for most of the words.

5 - Dialects and Accents similar to English

The Spanish spoken is Spain has different words and some of the letters make different sounds from the Spanish spoken in other parts of the world. In a way this is similar to the way the English of England is somewhat different from the English spoken in the United States.

Conclusion

Cognates, Character Set, Word Order, Sentence Structure, Parts of Speech, Dialects, Accents. Spanish has a lot of features that we already know about from knowing English. Spanish is probably more similar to English than most any other language you would study. So it's good to be aware of this and use it to your advantage