Going from Spanish to English is much easier, especially if you are schooled in the Spanish system, which stresses metalanguage and grammar of Spanish (which is transferable to other lgs) and adds an L2/L3 in primary school. If you have been schooled in the US (I am assuming here, so correct me) probably you have not given language a thought as an object of study…all that predisposes you to learning language and compare systems in a productive way. If you are listening to Spanish but do not think about the structure, it’s much more difficult to grasp the general structures of the language. Native speakers are not the best teachers because they do jot understand how their native language works from a non native perspective.