Why is Spanish so hard? Common problems we face when learning a new language 🫡👀💪

Learning a language isn’t as easy as it sounds, but it doesn’t have to be as painful and boring as some people describe it. Learning a language takes time and effort, but it’s a process we can enjoy.

However, there are some problems we might face during the journey, one of the most common ones is lack of motivation. The fact is when we start learning a language, we feel motivated and invincible, but the truth is as time goes by, the process gets harder.

There are different reasons that explain why it’s like that, but some of the most repetitive are: having very high expectations in short time, inconsistency, difficulties to find the time for studying, among others.

These obstacles are totally natural and most students come across them several times. However, the key to overcome them is to accept we’re struggling, and we need a solution. Depending on your problem, we can think of different solutions.

Common problems and how to solve them

Identifying a problem is not always easy, since sometimes we are the ones making up excuses for our behavior, Here you’ll find some tips depending on the problematic situation you’re facing.

I don’t have enough time for studying

This is one of the most common answers when you ask people why they stopped learning a language, and even though they might be right, there are always ways for studying in little time. It’s just a matter of being organized and reminding ourselves why learning this language is important for us.

A specific schedule is the key for practicing and learning. When we think about our day, it’s impossible to think we can’t have 15 minutes to study something, in most of the cases, the problem is we don’t have the energy to do it as a result of work, university, and other activities. Having a plan to follow and respecting it will help you to find as little as 15 minutes to put in practice your Spanish skills.

Another possibility is designing what kind of activities or skills you want to practice according to the day of the week, for instance, if you know you have more energy on Mondays, you can use your studying time for working on grammar, but if on Thursday your energy isn’t the same, you can use this day to listen to a good song, and practice pronunciation based on it. It requires less energy to think, but it’s still helpful.

Spanish is so confusing

It’s well known there are some languages that are easier to learn compared to others, sometimes they have a different alphabet, there’s no pronunciation patterns, or the grammar is complex.

When it comes to Spanish, one of the most difficult things is grammar, even though it can be learned and it’s pretty flexible, there are some tenses that require more time for being used in the right way.

There are many things that can make a language overwhelming, but the main reason is we want to learn everything at once regardless if we’re ready for it or not.

For example, a student with a very basic understanding shouldn’t be worried about using past perfect or subjunctive. Why? it’s too advanced for him!

People might think they’re doing something good finding out about other tenses, the problem is it’s more likely they start mixing up all basic and advanced tenses, and it can be a real nightmare to know which one to use.

I feel bored

Depending on the type of personality and learning style you have, you’ll find some activities way more interesting and useful than others, and that’s totally natural, the thing is if we want to master a language, we have to work on all the skills, unless we just need Spanish for a very specific purpose.

For instance, grammar can be pretty boring for most of the people, and they avoid it, however, grammar doesn’t have to be a synonym of boredom. If we work on grammar through a song, or sentences from a TV show we like, it makes it more interesting and easy to understand. The other clue is to forget about learning all the exceptions and uses, there’s no way we can remember tons of details about different tenses.

On the other hand, there will be days in which we don’t feel like practicing Spanish, since we don’t feel like doing anything else but resting. Our brain tries to tell us there will be other times for working on it. When it happens, it’s okay to skip one day, and let our brain rest, but the problem is when it becomes your new habit.

Procrastination is something we have to fight against to, even when it’s much better to watch Tik Toks or chat with our friends. Once we start practicing, the laziness or boredom feeling usually go away, but we have to make the first move for keeping ourselves in our goal.

I’m not making progress

At the beginning of our learning journey, we make a lot of progress in the first months, since everything is new to us, that’s why once we learn and use the new vocabulary, we feel motivated and proud of ourselves.

After a couple of months, we realise it’s a long process and we might feel we haven’t learned as much as we expected to do during those months.

We come across more difficult structures like subjunctive and past tenses, and we feel stuck while talking, or when we aren’t able to understand natives talking at a normal speed.

But the problem is we hurry, and we want to learn a second language and speak it the way we do it with our mother tongue, but it’s impossible.

We didn’t get the level we have right now when we were babies. We start using the language after a couple of years, and when we started communicating, we made mistakes, and could say everything we wanted. So, we should take this into account when we feel we’re not making progress.

So, first, it’ll take some time until you get a decent level, it’ll depend on many factors, as your exposure to the language. With this in mind, it’s essential to understand when we begin to use a second language, we should make it easier for us, and create and use simple sentences, and forget about complex structures for a while. There will be time for those when we gain confidence and more knowledge. Now imagine yourself as a small child that need to communicate his needs.

I don’t know how to study

Starting to learn a language leads to many questions, one of the most common ones is how to do it, and what resources to use. For the ones who can afford a teacher, it gets easier because there will be a guide that tells them what to focus on, and this teacher will prepare a list of topics and resources for covering during the lessons.

If you’re beginning the journey alone, the first thing you can do is create a list of resources and apps that can help you learn. For example, look for Youtube channels with Spanish content, you’ll find different types of channels that focus on different skills for different levels.

Go to social media and find influencers that talk and post about topics you’re interested in. Then, look for music in the target language, it doesn’t matter the genre, it’s important you can listen to different songs in the foreign language.

Besides that, download apps such as Duolingo that gives you an idea of the first topics to cover, and based on what you study there, you can go deeper and find videos related to the vocabulary, and create your own sentences.

Finally, think about the topics you talk about with your family, friends, or common situations in movies and soap operas. Those might be common topics for studying and practicing in Spanish.

Conclusions