The Latin languages are usually pretty easy if you already speak a Latin language. For example, I know Italians that live in Spain, who speak Italian with the locals, who reply to them in Spanish, and they can communicate effectively enough.
English is a Germanic language; however after the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the country was ruled by the French for 600 years, and Latin was used in church until Protestantism took over from Catholicism. So English has absorbed so many Latin words to the point that around 60% of the words in the English language aren't from Germanic origin. That gives us a bit of a boost when learning Latin languages. Here are a few examples of English words and their Spanish equivalents, to give you an idea.
| English | Spanish |
|---|---|
| Animal | Animal |
| Senator | Senador |
| Color | Color |
| Information | Información |
| Difference | Diferencia |
| Architecture | Arquitectura |
| Artist | Artista |
| Crisis | Crisis |
| National | Nacional |
What makes Spanish tricky is that there's 49 ways to conjugate every verb. For the verb "to be", there's 98, because they have two different versions of the verb. There's a few other tricky aspects, but overall, Spanish isn't all that difficult, although definitely a bit more difficult than English.
How interesting!!! Thank you for sharing the knowledge.
I had no idea that high of a percentage actually came from Latin not Germanic.
It's so fastinating and to think of all the variants of English you mentioned earlier play into all of it and of course slang terms.
There's literally thousands of cognates going from English to Latin languages. In the case of Spanish, they usually adhere to some very easy rules. But there are a few of what we call "false friends". For example, "embarazado" in Spanish means "pregnant", although you'd think it would mean embarrassed. And it's not too hard to see how pregnancy and embarrassment could come from the same etymological origin, but nonetheless, they mean very different things.