Maybe you're thinking about learning Spanish for work, for yourself, or because learning a foreign language is one of those things you'd like to do before you die.
Whatever your reason for thinking about learning Spanish, we have even more reasons that will convince you that learning this language is worth it.
Here are our top 10 reasons to learn Spanish.
Learning Spanish will Teach You Transferable Skills
When you decide to learn Spanish or any foreign language, for that matter, you'll pick up the language skills. However, the learning process you go through to learn a language will teach you lots of other useful skills, too.
As you learn, you won't always have the vocabulary or grammar to say exactly what you want to say. Instead, you'll have to think of different ways to get your point across. This practice will help you improve your lateral thinking and problem-solving skills.
You can't learn a foreign language without speaking to people and by learning Spanish, you can improve your self-confidence as well as your public speaking skills. If you're nervous about speaking to people in English, you're going to have to get over it when learning a foreign language!
Because you need to remember all the vocabulary and all the grammatical rules, you'll develop good methods, approaches, and techniques to remember things. As a result, your overall memory will improve.
Once you've studied a foreign language, you'll see that you naturally become better at studying anything because you'll have pushed yourself to memorise tonnes of words and grammatical rules and learned how to say things in lots of different ways.
Meet New People with Spanish
Learning a new language immediately makes it easier to meet new people because you can speak to them. While English is the biggest language in the world once you consider how many people learn it as a second language, that doesn't mean that "everybody speaks English".
There are plenty of people who speak Spanish or another language that don't speak English or don't speak English well enough to have a real conversation. Once you learn to speak Spanish, you can start meeting people and speaking to them in their language.
This is useful if you're looking to make new friends, network, or even broaden your search for “the one”. Spanish is a “Romance” language, though it's not for that reason.
Even Spanish speakers that can speak English will appreciate the effort, especially when it's fairly common for native English speakers to be monolingual. It'll help you to stand out and show that you've spent time learning another language.
Spanish is a Relatively Easy Language to Learn
We have to be clear that learning a language should never really be called "easy" because it's something that can take hundreds or thousands of hours of study just to gain enough proficiency to hold a conversation. Learning how to use your new oven should be easy, but learning a language shouldn't.
However, not all languages were created equal and some take longer to learn than others. Of course, this depends on who's studying them, but languages are easier to learn when they're similar to your mother tongue.
This is because you already know or understand the underlying structure or the roots of words and while Spanish is more closely related to other Romance languages like French, Portuguese, and Italian, for example, it's more closely related to English than languages like Chinese, Japanese, or Arabic.
If you're going to choose a language as a native English speaker, the easiest languages to learn are French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Of course, this doesn't mean that they're easy, just that they're easier than languages like Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
Spanish is Becoming More Important
Spanish is a growing language and not just in the countries where it's spoken in an official capacity. As the countries where it's spoken become more affluent, the language they speak also becomes more important as it's the vehicle for the deals being made. If you want to be part of this or work for one of the companies behind the economic growth, you need to speak their language.
Languages become more useful when more people speak them and while it's important to preserve and protect threatened minority languages, you'll see that people are far more interested in learning languages that a lot of people speak because it comes with way more opportunities for them.
The number of Spanish speakers around the world is expected to grow massively, which is going to make the language more important. When more people speak a language, more people learn said language, further increasing the number of people speaking it as a second language. This means that if you decide to learn Spanish, you'll be able to communicate with all the native speakers of the language as well as everybody who's gone through the arduous journey of learning the language, too.
This also means that you could become a Spanish teacher or tutor to teach everybody else who has to learn to speak Spanish!
Spanish is Widely Spoken
In a similar vein, Spanish is already really widely spoken. In terms of native speakers, the language is second in the world and only behind Mandarin Chinese. That's right, there are more native speakers of Spanish than there are native speakers of English. Around 6% of the world's population speaks Spanish natively.
Of course, once you consider total speakers, English jumps into first place and Hindi overtakes Spanish. Again, these are both commonly used as lingua franca, but Spanish, as we mentioned before, is also likely to follow this trend, especially in regions of the world where it's already widely spoken.
By learning Spanish, you'll be able to speak to plenty of new people whether they're native speakers or just other people who studied Spanish as you did. Naturally, some of these will also speak English as a lot of Spanish speakers will learn English as their second language, but not all of them!
Speaking Foreign Languages is Good for Your Health
Many studies have shown that speaking languages is great for your mental and physical health. In addition to improving brain function, learning a foreign language like Spanish can also delay the onset of dementia and Alzheimer's.
Bilingualism has also been shown to increase the speed at which patients recover from strokes and regain their cognitive processes.
Learning foreign languages has also been shown to delay the ageing process, especially in terms of cognitive decline, which will happen naturally in later life.
Speaking Spanish Unlocks Spanish-Speaking Culture
Learning Spanish doesn't just mean you can speak to Spanish-speaking people, it also means you can enjoy Spanish-language cinema, television, music, and literature.
In the same way that learning the language means that you can communicate with millions of people that you couldn't speak to before, it also means you can start enjoying way more media, which will give you a better understanding of the cultures behind them.
Once you see how many great shows, films, books, and songs are in Spanish, you'll regret not having enjoyed them or fully appreciated them earlier!
You Can Use Spanish When You Travel
One of the most obvious benefits of learning a foreign language is that you can use it when you're in places where said languages are spoken.
Once you speak to locals in their language, especially when travelling, you'll see how much better everything is. Aside from making your life easier, in a lot of places, you'll find that customer service gets a little better, waiters are friendlier, and the overall experience is better.
This is even more important in emergencies where you don't want misunderstandings or time is of the essence. It's also useful in less serious situations and can save you a lot of time whether you're checking into a hotel, renting a car, or organising transport while on a trip.
You'll Improve Your English
This is a benefit of learning any foreign language that isn't immediately obvious when you first start studying, but you'll soon see that by studying a language, you'll learn more about languages in general and be able to improve your mother tongue.
While not every structure in Spanish exists in English, there are aspects of grammar that are shared or are similar and when you need to properly understand it to use it, you'll understand better why you use it in English. After all, native speakers tend to learn their mother tongue through immersion rather than study and don't know why things are the way they are.
You'll See The World Differently
Finally, one of the most wonderful benefits of learning Spanish or any other language is that you'll start to see the world differently. Bilingualism has been shown to improve a person's empathy.
Once you speak somebody's language, you can understand them better and also understand what they're going through. Naturally, you'll also have a lot more patience for everybody trying to speak English as a foreign language because you'll truly understand the difficulties they're going through!
In any case, pretty much any of these reasons should be enough to study Spanish or any foreign language. If you're not convinced, however, there are also plenty of benefits for your work life!
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