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🇬🇧 → 🇪🇸

How easy is Spanish for English speakers?

Going from English to Spanish (Español) has a composite linguistic distance of 56% (curated lexical data). Below is the dimension-by-dimension breakdown.

56% distance FSI Cat I (Easiest) — 600–750 hours
Lexical similarity
18%

Shared vocabulary, cognates, and loanwords.

Grammatical distance
77%

Morphology, syntax, word order, cases.

Phonological similarity
0%

Shared sounds and phoneme inventory.

Writing-system match
100%

Latin → Latin

Genealogical kinship
40%

Indo-European ↔ Indo-European

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Sample sentences side-by-side

How everyday sentences look in both languages:

🇬🇧 English
The central hospital has a modern laboratory and excellent doctors.
🇪🇸 Spanish
El hospital central tiene un laboratorio moderno y doctores excelentes.
🇬🇧 English
Music, art, and literature are fundamental to human culture.
🇪🇸 Spanish
La música, el arte y la literatura son fundamentales para la cultura humana.

Other easy languages for English speakers

The 5 languages with the lowest linguistic distance from English:

Think you can tell them apart?

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