It is far more regular than Spanish in verb conjugation, easier to pronounce and has far fewer loan words from American Indian and non-European sources. The roots are so close to Latin that in many cases a well-educated English speaker will know cognates almost immediately, whereas in Spanish (and even more so in Portuguese) these can be obscured by the barbarization of Latin that took place in the Iberian peninsula after the fall of Rome (and, in some cases, even before it).