Everybody who is starting in Spanish looks for some easy Spanish to try and get to grips with it. Often they are amazed to realize that it is much easier that they thought it was. Spanish and English share common roots with Latin in particular, and to a lesser degree, Greek also. This means that many of the words merely need a different suffix from English to become Spanish – and they will mean exactly the same thing as well! Doesn't that sound like easy Spanish? It does and it is.
Take "plastic," for an instance. That word is "plastico" in Spanish. Well, you asked for easy Spanish, and it surely can't get any easier than this. When English-speaking people think about learning Spanish, they usually view it as one big problem. "No hay problema", and if you can't figure out what that Spanish phrase means, then you do have a problem. The best way to learn Spanish quickly is to learn all the easy words first. The grammar may be a little different, but it isn't really that big of a deal. Take for example the phrase mentioned above: "no hay problema." It literally means, "not there is problem." It shouldn't take long for you to adjust to this way of thinking and make that, "there's no problem," its English equivalent."
However, let's stick with the easy Spanish words first. It's the endings that change for many words, and it appears to be a regular thing too. As in the instance of "plastic" becoming "plastico," many other words ending in "ic" change to "ico" in Spanish. Clásico, cómico, histérico, metódico, técnico are all instances that you should have little difficulty in figuring what the English equivalent terms are. It's not just the "ic" ending words either. Easy Spanish gets even easier when you bring in all the other groups, such as "abundant" becoming "abundante" in Spanish, "monument" becomes "monumento," "pianist" becomes "pianista," "indication" becomes "indicación," "patent" becomes "patente," "religious" becomes "religioso."
Easy Spanish can be pretty easy many times. How do you spell, "central"? You spell it quite simply as, "central." The pronunciation is different from the English (you emphasize the "a" and not the "n"), but it's amazingly alike and definitely a good example of easy Spanish. There are others too. Other instances include words suchas, "animal," "noble," "admirable," and "director." Most of the times, these kind of words have the same meaning as their English counterparts, but at times they are somewhat different. For instance, the English word, "conductor" when applied to a person normally conjures up a picture of someone leading an orchestra. However, in Spanish, it means the driver of a car.
Sometimes, easy Spanish needs some form of creative thinking. A car is "coche" in Spanish. You may think initially that it's nothing like the English language, but think back to the time of highwaymen traveling the English countryside looking to hold up a coach. Coaches were the cars of those days, and the Spanish word, "coche" is just the modern equivalent.
There certainly are Spanish words that have no resemblance to their English equivelents, but that is to be expected; otherwise Spanish and English would be one language. Easy Spanish definitely exists, and it's easy to pick it up too. You really can learn Spanish easy, quickly, and systematicly by looking up the similarities between English and Spanish words.
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