With Spanish being spoken so widely throughout the world, I think it's over 400 million people, it's an excellent choice for anyone looking to expand their life experience through acquiring a new language. In this article we'll look at the process and the difficulties you could potentially encounter along the way.

Firstly it's important to realise that Spanish has a lot in common with English as they share some of the same Latin roots. Many words in the two languages are very alike and by learning some simple rules it's possible to easily convert 1000's of English words into Spanish.

This is a great start as it will help you to realize that Spanish is not something totally alien from the language you already know.

The ways the verbs are used in a language form its backbone and essentially if you understand how the verbs work you understand the language. Aside form action, verbs provide the contexts of past, present and future and so account for so much of the structure of the language.

Vocabulary is something separate from that and in Spanish it's good to treat them as separate challenges. You could, for example, begin by studying and understanding how the verbs are conjugated with just a few essential verbs for practice before moving on and concentrating more on building actual vocabulary.

So how many words do you need for conversational fluency? Most agree that it's 3000. That may seem a lot but it really isn't that hard to acquire them especially as many of them will be closely associated with English words anyway.