English and Spanish are the two most popular languages in the world. English is the planet’s 1st most studied and most spoken language. Spanish, meanwhile, is the 2nd most studied and 4th most spoken language.
Since you’re here, there’s a chance you’re learning Spanish - or maybe learning English! - and as a Spanish language school, we hope that discovering some of the differences between the two, side by side, will help you understand both languages a bit better. Or simply arm you with some fun facts! Let’s go…
Spanish has 500 million native speakers, and when you add non-native speakers, the total number of Spanish speakers rises to 600 million, meaning 7.5% of the world speaks Spanish. English has 400 million native speakers, with 17% of the world speaking English including non-native speakers.
After considering non-native speakers, English is the #1 most spoken language in the world as of 2024. Spanish is the 4th most spoken language.
Spanish is the 2nd most studied language with 23 million learners, placing it just behind English, which is the 1st most studied language in the world with over 1 billion learners. It may seem close but you can see there’s a huge distance between 1st and 2nd place.
All nouns in Spanish are assigned a grammatical gender, affecting both the article and adjective that accompany the noun, whereas in English, nouns have no grammatical gender.
Take the moon, which is considered feminine in Spanish: “la luna” while the sun is considered masculine: “el sol”. In English, you would simply say “the moon” or “the sun”.
In Spanish, double negatives are grammatically correct and commonly used but in English, double negatives are generally considered unacceptable.
For example, in Spanish you can say “I don’t want nothing” which translates to “No quiero nada” and it’s grammatically correct. In English, while understandable, this sounds a bit rough and you’d have to say “I don’t want anything”.
Subject pronouns (I, you, we) are often omitted when phrasing sentences in Spanish. In English however, subject pronouns are always required.
For example, “Estoy hablando” or “Yo estoy hablando” can both correctly be used in Spanish and “yo” can easily be omitted as verbs are conjugated differently for each subject pronoun. But in English, different subject pronouns can take the same verb conjugation so you would have to say “I am talking” and you absolutely cannot omit the “I”.
When ordering sentences in Spanish, adjectives are mostly placed after the noun. For example, “comida organica”. But when ordering sentences in English, adjectives are placed before the noun. For example, “organic food”.
Surprisingly, Spanish has fewer vocabulary words than English. Authoritative Spanish dictionaries contain around 100,000 words. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, English contains 170,000 words that are in current use. Some sources place the total as high as 1 million words in English, which is based on an estimate by Harvard University and Google in 2010, but this number includes different forms of the same word and many old-fashioned words that aren’t used in modern English.
In Spanish, you have feelings, but in English, you are your feelings. If you were feeling scared, in Spanish you would say “Tengo miedo” which directly translates to “I have fear”. But in English, you would say “I am scared”.
Spanish is the official language in 20 different countries (or 21 if you include Puerto Rico). English is the official language in 67 different countries.
Speaking of pronunciation, Spanish is a touch easier to learn than English. Spanish is considered very phonetic, meaning that words sound as they are spelled. Whereas English is considered not phonetic, as words are not always pronounced as they are spelled.
Yep, appearances in English can be deceptive: “through”, “though”, and “thought” are all pronounced differently despite seemingly having the same pronunciation.
Keen to know more about how Spanish compares to English?
We hope that looking at a few of the differences between English and Spanish has left you as intrigued with the languages as we were while we put this post together. And being aware of the grammatical differences between two languages can also help you speed up the learning process with a deeper understanding of how everything fits together.
There are also plenty more differences we didn’t manage to fit in, which we cover in more detail in our Spanish language courses in Barcelona. If you’d like to immerse yourself in the details and differences of the Spanish language then get in touch.
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