Table of ContentsIntroductionComparison of SoundsComparison of GrammarEnglish SpanishLanguage and ThoughtAcquisitionConclusionIntroductionEnglish is the first language I learned during my childhood, and it is the only language I acquired natively . I was born and raised in Sherman Oaks, a suburb of Los Angeles located in the San Fernando Valley. Sherman Oaks is primarily an English-speaking neighborhood, so during my early childhood I was primarily exposed to English and was able to develop the language natively. Additionally, my extended family comes from similar communities across the country (i.e. Edina, a suburb of Minneapolis, and Hastings, a suburb of New York City) in which English is the primary language spoken. So, during my early childhood, English was pretty much the only language I was exposed to. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay However, as I got older, I began venturing outside of my neighborhood, either visiting friends or even just restaurants in other cities across the country. In the valley, I began to notice a number of different languages, ranging from Spanish to Hebrew. At first, I would just listen to the sounds of the languages ​​and personally notice how radically they differed from English. But over time, I slowly started learning words and expressions from these languages ​​simply through my exposure to them. But Hebrew is a language that I have some experience speaking because during my childhood I attended the Hebrew school at my temple, and during those classes I learned the Jewish prayers (which are in Hebrew) and their meanings. So even though I wasn't taught grammar or vocabulary, I had the experience of speaking them in a religious context. Most of my Hebrew/Jewish studies took place in elementary and middle school, but stopped once I reached high school. I attended Cleveland High School in Reseda, another Valley neighborhood. However, it was very different from my hometown of Sherman Oaks linguistically because it was primarily a Spanish-speaking area. And oddly enough, I studied Spanish for three years in high school because it was the only foreign language offered. However, these courses did not really focus on spoken language, but rather on the vocabulary and grammar of written language. Each chapter of the textbook consisted of a set of vocabulary words and a new grammar rule (e.g. past tense conjugation). And once we got to Spanish 3, each week the teacher had one or two days a week where we were only allowed to speak Spanish to test our knowledge of the language. Unfortunately, I didn't retain much of the material because this mundane approach to the subject didn't really focus on the most frequent rules and words that people say on a daily basis, so it was hard to relate to life daily.Comparison of soundsAlthough Spanish and English have practically the same alphabet, there are various differences not only in the letters themselves, but especially in their pronunciation. In both languages ​​there are voiced and voiceless fricatives, but a major difference is that, unlike English, there are only two voiced alveolar fricatives in the entire Spanish language, [j] as in amarillo and [ š] as in vaya. The first can be done by flattening your lips and pushing your tongue towards the alveolar ridge, and the second can be done by rounding your lips andalso pushing your tongue towards the alveolar ridge. The sound of the Spanish letter “ñ” is another difference. in sounds between Spanish and English, because this sound does not exist at all in the English language. This alveolar nasal sound voiced [n] is found in a number of words throughout the Spanish language, such as niño and pequeño. Similar to the alveolar sounds in the previous paragraph, this sound can be made by pushing your tongue toward the alveolar ridge and simultaneously exhaling through your nose. And although this sound does not exist in English, in my experience I had no problem producing this sound. A third example of the differences between the sounds of Spanish and English is the absence of voiced alveopalatal fluid [r] in English. . In Spanish, this is a very common sound found in words such as perro and carro. In English, we only have the voiced alveolar sound [r], found in words such as rope and car. In both cases, the sound is made by slightly uncurling your lips and pushing your tongue up to the alveolar ridge. However, in the case of the Spanish [r] sound, when the voice is produced, you must vibrate your tongue quickly to produce the rolling effect of the sound. It's a sound that initially gave me trouble because there's nothing like it in the English language, so I had to teach myself how to pronounce it and practice it until I gets the right sound. Grammar Comparison To begin with, Spanish and English are both SVO languages, which means their term orders in sentences are subject-verb-object. Here is an example of the SVO sentence structure in both languages: Bill come la manzana. “Bill eats the apple.” El estudiante va a la biblioteca “The student goes to the library.” If there is a pronoun in place of the object (direct or indirect) in a sentence, English still retains the SVO structure. For example, take the sentence “Carlos ate the oranges,” then replace the object “the oranges” with “them” to produce the sentence “Carlos ate them.” In English this rule makes perfect sense, but this is not the case in Spanish. If such a change were made in Spanish, the word order would change from SVO to SOV. Carlos comió las naranjas Carlos las comió. Carlos ate the oranges that Carlos ate. The two languages ​​also differ in how they modify nouns. In English, a noun phrase consists of a determiner, an adjective, a noun as well as an optional prepositional phrase, in that particular order. Therefore, an adjective always comes before the noun, regardless of the circumstance (e.g. big balloon, orange bottle, etc.). In contrast, descriptive modifiers in Spanish precede nouns. This refers to most cases in which the adjective is purely descriptive, however adjectives that describe a number or somehow attribute a subjective emotional aspect actually follow the nouns.English SpanishYoung man El hombre viejoBlack pants Los pantelones negroRed apple La manzana roja*Three computers *Tres computadoras *This asterisk refers to the fact that this example is the special case in Spanish where the adjective precedes the noun as in English. Although I now understand this difference between the two languages, it was initially difficult to say and write sentences correctly in Spanish. With English, I no longer need to consciously review grammar rules to produce a sentence because I learned the language during the "critical age", and therefore have all the rules deeply ingrained in my spirit. In contrast, with Spanish, I still have to think about the rules before saying or writing a sentence, and often I still make mistakes when applying English rules to Spanish sentences..