So you are heading to Spain, and want to know whether you need to speak Spanish? Well the simple answer to that is yes my friend you do! Now you don’t have to speak perfect Spanish like the folks in Valladolid, but you certainly do need to know enough to get around town. You will become one of a massive club, since there are over 400 million Spanish speakers worldwide, from Lima to Macau. So even when you leave Spain you will find that it is a useful language. The Spanish call their language Castellano because the language originated in Castile back in the 9th century. These days there are different dialects throughout the country.
If you don’t study the language then you are still going to be able to get around in Spain, but you certainly won’t get as much out of your stay, or be able to access the country’s rich culture. Spanish is not that complicated and the grammar is easy. Intonation is used to change meaning, rather than complex sentence structures, and the spelling is not too hard.