I feel like as my Spanish keeps advancing I am now learning real Spanish words what I mean by this is because I am a native English speaker there are A LOT of similar words that cross over from English to Spanish for example “Perfecto” “dia” “idea” those are only a few examples I can think of on the top of my head but I know that there are A LOT MORE so as I keep slowly but surely progressing I am no longer seeing words that I can more or less guess from just looking at them. which is now taking me a lot longer as I have nothing to compare them to.
This is the really nice thing about Romance languages - there is a lot of transferable knowledge from English. I remember when I was learning Italian, I reached a point where I realised that, for example, nouns ending in “-ance” in English basically just switched into “-anza” in Italian, so ambulance = ambulanza. It doesn’t always work, of course, but it does surprisingly often.
Likewise English nouns ending “-uct” tend to become “-otto” , so “the product” = “il prodotto”. And English verbs ending in “-ate” almost invariably become “-are” verbs (operate/operare) ; verbs ending in “-ify” become “-ificare” (modify/modificare) ; verbs ending in “-uce” often become “-urre” (produce/produrre) …and so on.
It holds good for abstract nouns too. Thus “-tion” => “-zione” (station/stazione) ; “-ity” =>“-ità” (university/università, city/città, etc.)
There are, in total, literally thousands of words like the above examples - it does make the leaner’s life very much easier.
(Spare a thought for the poor b__tardo who is learning Chinese or Indonesian, etc… :-D)
yeah but I am slowly reaching the point now in my Spanish where I already know all of those very similar words now I am having to learning the Spanish words that have no similarity to English so it is taking me that much longer to learn them I can see how these people with 30k Spanish words have been studying Spanish for atleast 1.5 years lol it takes time.
That feeling, is the same that an English speaker has at the beginner stages of most Asian/Non-indoeuropean languages. It’s rough, but the more and more exposure you they start coming easier as you are able to more easily learn through context.
They will come with time. But yeah, it’s definitely becomes harder to add more words.
Comes the day when you recognize new words not from their similarity to English words, but from the words, affixes, and roots you’ve learned in your target language.