4 ms·

Spanish would be a much better global language than English or French due to simple phonetics and overall consistency. Gendered nouns are really simple. I'd sa

• tpm 9y ago
  Yes, Spanish is mostly simple and consistent. It feels too verbose though. I think there are more (space or time) efficient languages.
  • moomin 9y ago
    I think Spanish speakers compensate for this by speaking quickly. Since Spanish has a simple and unambiguous syllable structure, this is perfectly possible. Contrast with Mandarin, which can be pretty terse but also requires precision in pronunciation. Apparently the information density of most languages when spoken by native speakers is much the same, despite variations in verbosity.
• cletus 9y ago
  Disclaimer: I'm a Spanish newb. While there are good things about Spanish, speaking as a native English speaker there are annoyances too. One big on compared to English is that English is seemingly more economical with syllables than Spanish for many common words e.g. Demasiado, todavia, many adverbs like recientemente. Spanish does seem to be one if the better languages for gender of nouns in that fairly simple rules seem to correctly classify many but still not having a gender for table or chair is imho inherently better from a cognitive load standpoint. Likewise the agreement of article, gender and number is much simpler than, say, German. English also wins with much simpler verb conjugation. The forms in Spanish are distinct enough that pronoun subjects are often dropped. I prefer "I speak" and "we speak" to "[yo] hablo" and "[nosotros/nosotras] hablamos". Again English is far more economical with syllables here. Spanish object pronouns are a PITA because they're ambiguous to the point that you gave to add "a ella" to things. I also find the number of accents used to be incredibly tedious but at least they don't seem to be critical and are consistent with the pronunciation. Modern English also has only one second person form. Spanish has 3 or 4 (tu, usted, ustedes and Latin American Spanish doesn't seem to use the vosotros form that Spain does). I also find the ordering of pronouns common in mainland European languages a PITA meaning objection pronouns before the verb, non-pronoun objects after. English actually front weights important information pretty darn well from a linguistic standpoint but at least Spanish doesn't have anything silly like German's separable verbs or putting the verb last in Nebensatzen. The interesting thing about English was that it lost a lot of the linguistic bullshit (basically) during the centuries wheer it wasn't the official language of England (French was), this being the transition from Old English (essentially a foreign language at this point) to Middle English (mostly comprehensible to Modern English speakers).
  • ivm 9y ago
    Spanish conjugations are not harder for me than saying the right English verb (do/does, was/were, am/are/is, has/have). Yes, conjugation adds a bit more to learn at the start but learning English spelling and irregular verbs took me years at school. And I'm still not sure when to use many of the English perfect tenses. (Editing this comment because I made a conjugation mistake for the millionth time – "add" instead of "adds".)
• deleted 9y ago
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