IndexIntroductionComparison of SoundsComparison of GrammarSpanish EnglishLanguage and ThinkingAcquisitionConclusionIntroductionEnglish 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 exposed primarily to English and was therefore able to develop the language natively. Additionally, my extended family comes from similar communities across the country (e.g. Edina, a suburb of Minneapolis, and Hastings, a suburb of New York City) where English is the primary language spoken. Therefore, 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 Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get Original Essay However, as I grew older and began venturing out of my neighborhood, to friends' houses, or even just to restaurants in other cities within the valley, I began to notice a number of different languages, from Spanish to Jewish. At first I simply listened to the sounds of the languages ​​and personally noticed how they differed drastically from English. But as time went by, I slowly began to learn words and phrases from such languages ​​simply through my exposure to them. But Hebrew is a language that I have some experience speaking because during my childhood I attended Hebrew school at my temple, and during these lessons I would learn the Jewish prayers (which are in Hebrew) and their meaning. So, even though I wasn't taught grammar or vocabulary, I had experience speaking it in a religious context. Most of my Hebrew studies took place in elementary and middle school, but stopped once I got to high school. I attended Cleveland High School in Reseda, another Valley neighborhood. However, this was very different from my hometown of Sherman Oaks from a linguistic standpoint because it was primarily a Spanish-speaking area. And, strangely enough, I took three years of Spanish in high school because it was the only foreign language they offered. These lessons however did not really focus on speaking the language, but rather on the vocabulary and grammar of the written language. Each chapter of the textbook consisted of a set of vocabulary words and a new grammatical 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 banal approach to the topic didn't really focus on the rules and most frequent words that people say on a daily basis, so it was difficult to relate to everyday life. Comparison of soundsAlthough Spanish and English have practically the same alphabet, there are various differences not only in the letters themselves, but above all in their pronunciation. In both languages ​​there are both voiced and voiceless fricatives, but the main 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 former can be achieved by flattening the lips and pushing the tongue towards the alveolar ridge, while the latter can be achieved by rounding the lips and also pushing the tongue towards the alveolar ridge. The sound of the Spanish letter “ñ” is another difference. in the sounds between Spanish andEnglish, since this sound does not exist at all in the English language. This voiced alveolar nasal sound [n] is found in numerous words throughout the Spanish language, such as niño and pequeño. Similar to the alveolar sounds in the previous paragraph, this sound can be produced by pushing the tongue onto the alveolar ridge and exhaling through the nose at the same time. And although this sound does not exist in the English language, in my experience I have had no problems producing it. A third example of the differences between the sounds of Spanish and English is the lack of the voiced alveopalatal fluid [r] in English. In Spanish, this is a very common sound found in words like perro and carro. In English we only have the voiced alveolar sound [r], which is found in words like rope and car. In both cases, the sound is produced by slightly rounding the lips and pushing the tongue towards the alveolar ridge. However, in the case of the Spanish [r] sound, as the voice is produced, you must rapidly vibrate your tongue to produce the rolling effect of the sound. This was a sound that initially gave me trouble because there is nothing like it in the English language, so I just had to learn how to pronounce it and practice until I got the sound right. Grammar Comparison To begin with, Spanish and English are both SVO languages, or the order of terms in sentences, are subject-verb-object. Here is an example of the SVO sentence structure in both languages. Bill like manzana. 'Bill eats the apple.'El estudiante va a la biblioteca 'The student goes to the library.'If in a sentence there is a pronoun instead of the object (direct or indirect), English still maintains the SVO structure. For example, take the sentence "Carlos ate the oranges" and then change the object "the oranges" to "they" to produce the sentence "Carlos ate them." In English this rule makes perfect sense, however this is not the case in Spanish. If this 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 Carlos ate them.The two languages ​​also differ in the way they modify nouns. In English, a noun phrase is made up of a determiner, an adjective, a noun, and also an optional prepositional phrase, in that particular order. Therefore the adjective always precedes the noun, regardless of the circumstance (e.g. large balloon, orange bottle, etc.). In contrast, descriptive modifiers in Spanish precede nouns. This refers to most cases where the adjective is purely descriptive, however adjectives that describe a number or in some way attribute a subjective emotional aspect do in fact follow nouns.English SpanishYoung El hombre viejoBlack trousers 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 pronounce and write sentences in Spanish correctly. With English I no longer have to consciously review grammatical rules to produce a sentence because I learned the language during the “critical age” and therefore have all the rules deeply ingrained in my mind. In contrast, with Spanish I still have to think about the rules before saying or writing a sentence, and I often still make mistakes when applying English rules to Spanish sentences. For example, just the other day I was describing my "old phone" to my friend in Spanish, and I went back to the English word order by saying "el viejo teléfono" and opposite to "el teléfono viejo". Language and thought Spanish has two grammatical genders: masculine and feminine. This concept can be seen in many aspects.