Spanish is different from English -Know How?

By | January 16, 2012

Spanish and English, both have few similarities but more differences. There are people who still assume a Spanish script to be a English script. This happens due to ignorance. Both these languages are most popularly spoken languages across the globe. However, there are lot of differences between these languages and let’s check what they are.

  • Spanish is a romance language whereas English is originated from a Germanic language.
  • Spanish uses Latin alphabet and English uses Roman or Latin alphabet which consists of 26 letters. In addition to 26 English letters, Spanish has extra letters like -ch, ll, & ñ .
  • Aspects like Vowel sounds and sentence stress are entirely different in both the languages. Spanish has 5 pure vowels and 5 diphthongs and the length of the vowel differs between words. Whereas, English has 12 pure vowel sounds and 8 diphthongs and the length of the vowel plays a major role.
  • Vocabulary in English is huge having origins from different foreign languages like Latin, French, Arabic, Russian and even Spanish. Whereas, Spanish remains pure in terms of vocabulary and is truly of Spanish origin.
  • Spanish is syllable timed language while English is a stress-timed language.
  • Spanish is distinctive even in the use of double consonant. But in English wherever the stress is required we tend to use double consonants without any exceptions. But in Spanish few consonants like c,n,r etc., are capable of doubling.
  • Coming to the grammar – in Spanish even proper nouns do have genders – the masculine and the feminine, which is entirely absent in English. So, when learning Spanish we need to know to which group the noun belongs to and hence should use proper pronouns.
  • Unlike in English where the verb alone follows the noun, in Spanish adjectives must also follow the noun. Example for singular noun singular adjective and for plural nouns plural adjective should be used.

These are few significant differences which make Spanish different from English.