A lot of the Spanish language instruction books insist that word order in Spanish sentences is not that different from that of English. I wonder. It seems that when I read an extended selection of Spanish, such as a chapter of a novel, the words are not exactly where I'd expect them to be. And when I try to compose in Spanish, a necessity for keeping up with correspondence with my pen-pals, I find that a great deal of the corrections my Spanish friends make in my written Spanish have to do with word order. That's just not quite the way they'd say it. I've experienced the same problem when they write to me in English. They've written a sentence with all the requisite vocabulary, but it's just not the way it would be expressed in English.
And though there are a few grammar and usage rules for this, it seems to me that it's only through repeated exposure and practice that one would get the hang of it. Often, it's very difficult for me to explain to my pen-pals exactly why a sentence they have written is not quite correct. The 'to' needs to be left off the infinitive, or a preposition needs to be added here and taken away from there. All these things just seem intuitive and automatic for someone who uses the language every day.
This tells me that I'm on the right track with making use that I read, listen, and write in Spanish every day, and for the best and fastest results to spend several hours each day doing these activities. It all comes down to the fact that English is simply not a hybrid of Spanish or vice versa. Though both have Latin origins, they evolved differently and Spanish adopted the Latin custom of flexibility in word order, whereas I suppose English went more with the German way of building a sentence. Either way, I can see that I've got a lot of work to do if I want to sound more authentic.
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