How Similar Are English and Spanish?

Have you ever seen a new word in Spanish and immediately knew what it meant because it looked like a word in English? For example, if you had never seen the word televisión before, would you know that it means television in English? Probably! That’s because there’s a lot these two languages have in common. If you’ve ever wondered, “How similar are English and Spanish?” then you’ve come to the right place. We’ll take a look at some similarities and differences.

So, how similar ARE English and Spanish?

They tend to have many similarities, and that’s partly because they do have a similar root, being indo-European languages. If you’re interested, there are many interesting facts about this category of languages, but basically, they’re the languages native to most of Europe. They both share similar Greek and Latin connections, which means there are lots of cognates, or words that look the same and have the same meaning in multiple languages.

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In addition to having lots of words in common, they also have one very important similarity: the alphabet. They share the same alphabet, with the exception that Spanish has an additional letter- ñ.

Do they have the same grammar?

The answer to this is yes and no. There are more differences than similarities, but there is still a good amount of overlap. There are a few key grammatical differences that are important to note. First, adjectives in English go before the noun, but in Spanish, the adjectives go after the noun. In addition, English uses an apostraphe to show possession, but in Spanish that isn’t allowed. In order to say Jason’s book, you’d have to literally say el libro de Jason, which literally translates to the book of Jason. These are two concepts for native English speakers that tend to be tricky.

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At first glance, it might seem like Spanish has way more grammatical rules than English, or at least many different ones that English doesn’t have. Although Spanish has more types of verb conjugations, verbs in English conjugate too! Native English speakers don’t think about conjugating verbs because it’s just natural.