I chose to write my final report on the comparison of Spanish and English.

Both of my
parents were born in Mexico and migrated to the United States before I was born. I lived in
southern California until the age of fifteen. The area that I lived in was always highly
concentrated with Hispanic people, therefore every one spoke Spanish. I recall learning the
Spanish and English alphabet simultaneously when I began elementary school at the age of five.
Although my parents only spoke Spanish at home, I had two older brothers who learned English
before I did and they mainly communicated in English. I think that I learned English through my
brothers before beginning school, and that is why I do not recall having any difficulty learning to
speak English. I am now fluent in English and Spanish; I do have some difficulties at times. I
could be reading in English and come across a word such as this then my mind plays tricks on
me and I pronounce the word as theese. I also grew up hearing Spanish sayings so when I hear
some English sayings I do not understand what they mean. I remember about two months ago I
was in a fitness class and a classmate was talking about progress and she said I turned a corner
that day I had to stop her and ask what that meant. I do get teased at times because my Spanish
accent is undetectable and as soon as I get tired or I am talking too fast, my Spanish accent steps
in and I end us sounding funny. My response to the teasing is hey, I speak Spanish.
I used to be ashamed of speaking my native language because I experienced a lot of
shame for my ethnicity when I was growing up watching the news and learning how some
people view Mexicans and Immigrants in general. I have grown to learn that my ethnicity and
native language are a gift, and thats is why I chose to write my paper on the comparison of
English and Spanish.

Sounds
Spanish is a diverse language because although it all comes from the same place; it
contains many different dialects. If you went to Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, or the Dominican
Republic you will realize that all of these people sound very different. Spanish originated from
Vulgar Latin, and developed gradually after the fall of the Roman Empire. Spanish is one of the
Romance languages in the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European language family. The Spanish
examples in this paper are based on Latin American Spanish, not Peninsular Spanish.
Spanish uses the Latin alphabet and the Spanish alphabet (abecedario), it contains 27
letters while the English alphabet contains 26. Spanish contains five vowels without spelling
exceptions, English also contains five vowels but contains long and short stress. Although the
only letter difference between the Spanish and English language is the letter , vowels are very
different when compared. Vowels in both languages are always voiced, but English has 15 vowel
sounds, while Spanish has 19. Spanish vowels represent only one sound (example /a/ casa, coka,
amar the sound /a/ never changes). As I reviewed the English vowels in this Linguistics class I
recall that the English vowels can represent a different sound (ex. /a/ hat (haet), hate (heit)).
Spanish vowels are always pronounced while they can disappear in English during some
instances (ex. Every:EvrI).
English speakers who are learning Spanish may experience difficulty when reading letters
such as C, that may be pronounced two different ways in the same word acercar. The letter H
has a different sound in Spanish than it does in English, for example when you say hog in
English you pronounce the H, but when you say hola in Spanish you drop the H and it sounds
as though it is spelled like thisola.
Morphology

When comparing how English and Spanish morphology contrast I found that the two are
strikingly different. Spanish morphology is easily modified while English relies on the meaning
of a word and this makes the English language more dependent on meaning of words and word
structure. Spanish carries high inflections, although English does use inflections it does not use
them as much as Spanish does. An inflection is defined as a change in the form of a word, the
change will most likely happen at the ending of a word. Inflections are used to express things
such as a person, tense, mood, number, case, gender and it defines the varying strength of the
tone or pitch used to pronounce the word.
Spanish inflections affect nouns, verbs, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and articles. These
inflections may also change the meaning of the words and verbs may be inflected based on the
mood or tense a person is attempting to convey. The Spanish noun amig-a (friend) has an
inflection of an a at the end, this makes the word feminine and it means there is only one. If you
are speaking about a male friend the word changes to amigo, the letter o changes the word to
male. If you want to say the noun in plural form you would say amig-os, amig-a, and if you want
to talk about a small male friend you would call him your amig-ito(female amig-ita). Here we
used the Spanish inflections a,o,as,os,ito,ita to change the gender, number,and size of your friend.
We will now focus on the English noun House, the word does not change whether its
big or small. When you say the word in Spanish you may use the inflections ita ota to
change the meaning to smaller house or bigger house. Notice that the word House is neither male
or female in English, but it takes a feminine form in Spanish. Gender roles may be confusing for
new Spanish learners, a hint for Spanish learners is to always look at the inflection of the word
and determine the gender. If the noun ends with o, os, or ito the noun is male; if the inflection at
the end is a, as, or ita the word is feminine.

The big house---- La Casota

The small house -----La Casita

Syntax
Spanish word order rules are different than English word order. When we want to change
the meaning of a word in English we can simply use stress to imply something different than the
actual meaning of the words. Think about this sentence for a second I didnt say she crashed
your car, here you are just saying you simply did not say she crashed the car. Now read this
sentence by only stressing the word I. Notice that you have not changed the word order at all, but
you have officially changed the meaning of the sentence. Instead of meaning that you didnt say
she crashed the car, you have implied that someone else said it. Spanish word order rules allow
us to rearrange word order without changing the meaning of what we are trying to communicate,
the meaning of a sentence would be entirely different if we did the same thing in English. For
example when we say the dogs are barking if we change word order to are the dogs barking
we are not making a statement about the dogs any longer, we are asking a question. Now we will
try this in Spanish, if I want to say los bebes son graciosos(the babies are funny) I can change
word order to Son los bebes graciosos(the babies are funny) and the sentence maintains its
meaning.
English does not allow the use of double negatives, while Spanish requires them. If we
were writing an English paper for school and the paper contained a sentence that read He aint
got no friends we would be marked down because that is grammatically incorrect. If we were
writing a Spanish paper and wrote the same sentence as El no tiene ningunos amigos your
Spanish teacher would know you have mastered the use of double negatives in the Spanish
language.
Semantics

As I previously established Spanish and English speakers have two different methods for
how they set up their sentences. I think English is a more possessive language than Spanish
because when a person says I forgot my lunch at home they are owning the responsibility of
forgetting. A Spanish speaker would say the same sentence as se me olvido el lonche meaning
that the lunch forgot itself.
Spanish and English thoughts are structured differently because of the possessive, and
non possessiveness of each language. An English speaker may make the mistake of saying Yo
tengo olvidado mi lonche when they are learning to translate I have forgotten my lunch into
Spanish because the Spanish verb to have is treated differently.
I think that the possessive and non possessive nature relates to two different cultural
outlooks on responsibility. English speaking Americans generally believe they are responsible for
their own actions, where Hispanic culture is more easy going. American culture finds pride in
being punctual, while Hispanic culture accepts being late as part of the plan. Also, in American
culture if some thing is going wrong their response is what should I do?, Hispanics (at least in
my family) believe the responsibility belongs to a higher power. The popular Hispanic response
is si dios quiere which means- if thats what god wants.
Acquisition
I am extremely lucky that strangers can not detect my Spanish accent most of the time.
People commonly ask me if I speak Spanish, and I think that is because I spend most of my time
speaking and thinking in English. I mainly speak Spanish around my family or friends who speak
Spanish. One difficulty I experience mostly in English is enunciation of words mainly with
vowel sounds. I did not know that vowels always sound the same in Spanish, and my mind

follows that rule for English which makes me sound pretty funny. I think that is why I had a hard
time paying close attention to the vowel chart and hearing the difference.
My favorite mistake is when I say lets get off the car in English when I mean to say
lets get out of the car. When I was growing up my parents would always say bajense de el
carro and the veb bajate means to get down. When I want to translate the sentence in English I
make the mistake of saying get off because I am assuming we are on top of the car since I need to
get down from the car when I am saying it in Spanish.
Conclusion
I knew writing this paper was going to be a lot of fun because I am genuinely interested
in the differences between Spanish and English. I honestly never thought about how different the
two languages are because I learned them both during the critical point of language acquisition.
There were definitely a lot of point during the paper where I realized why I made the silly
grammatical mistakes in my mind when speaking English. It is still going to be hard for me to
remember why I make vowel sound mistakes when I speak English, but I will be able to work on
it know because I what the problem is. I will also have better tools to help my boyfriend who is
learning Spanish, and my future students who will be trying to learn English.

Bibliography
1. History of the Spanish language. (2016, April 24). Retrieved April 30, 2016, from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Spanish_language
2. Gordinier, J. (2008). X saves the world: How Generation X got the shaft but can still keep
everything from sucking. New York: Viking.
3. Comparing english and spanish powerpoint. (2015, April 5). Retrieved April 30, 2016, from
http://www.slideshare.net/cayeen/comparing-english-and-spanish-powerpoint-12295622