Learning Spanish

My Experience With Spanish

I took Spanish starting in middle school (not much), through high school (to AP level; I got a 5!), and then passively since. I've acquired and gone through a couple of books on Spanish grammar. I've read some books in Spanish. There are some people in my life I can talk Spanish with, but they all speak English very well so I don't practice too much, though maybe in 2020 that will change. Most of the Spanish I know is of Mexican/Latin American flavor as I live in California.

I don't typically feel too comfortable using Spanish with people that speak English well because English already serves the role as a "lingua franca" and I don't feel any particular affinity to Hispanic cultures I've encountered.

Learning Spanish

What follows applies from my experience as a native English speaker. I think this is not English-speaker specific stuff though.

Easy Stuff

• Plentiful resources—including rich lexical resources like the Diccionario de la lengua española from the Real Academia Española
• Spelling is pretty nice—you will naturally become acquainted with a handful of "rules"
• Widely spoken language with many native speakers
• Translations of almost everything into Spanish; if you want to practice Spanish without diving into native Spanish language literature you can most likely go read what you wanted to read in English in Spanish as well
• Interesting/diverse media—heck you could even watched Spanish dubbed anime lol

If you've studied a language that uses a non-alphabetic script, like Chinese you will very quickly come to appreciate the reasonableness of Spanish spelling and consequently how easy it is to look up unfamiliar words.

Hard Stuff

• Regional differences—Spanish is a pluricentric language meaning that there are many "standard" varieties of Spanish
• Vocabulary unlike anything you've seen—Spanish draws on many different languages. The more time you spend with it, the more strange words you will run into, regardless of what language(s) you come from.
• Hard to get perfect—if you do something like mix up grammatical gender, chances are you will be understood, but you will clearly sound off. Same thing with fancy verb endings. You can get by communicating most of the meanings you need to with a rich vocabulary and one week's worth of grammar, but it will take some serious time and practice to sound like a boss.
• I can only properly roll my r's like 60% of the time still.

Should I learn Spanish?

If you live in a place with many Spanish speakers and you want to learn a second language, I would recommend learning Spanish. Knowing a little bit of Spanish can go a long way, and diving more into Spanish is a long road if you would to travel that way—there is always more to learn.

Even if you don't live around many Spanish speakers, I would suggest learning Spanish first over some hipster language like Esperanto or some cultural appropriation language like Japanese (you weeb) because it is a relatively "unmarked" choice for a second language. Deciding to learn Spanish is a very normal, run-of-the-mill, perceived-as-useful thing to do. Like English, it useful in many places in the world, and its use is projected to grow in coming decades.

Spanish has a very easy learning curve. It is easy to get started with Spanish right away, unlike with the East Asian languages which have all these funny symbols, very unfamiliar sounds to English speakers, etc. Spanish gets harder as you learn more, which can be a very good thing because this means you won't get bored.