4 ms·
Native here. What most extrangers complain about is verbs. For every verb there are a hundred forms and most used verbs are irregular, so you need to learn doze
by narag 7y ago
Native here. What most extrangers complain about is verbs. For every verb there are a hundred forms and most used verbs are irregular, so you need to learn dozens of exceptional forms. We learn all those when we're children so it's not painful, for new learners... The rest is very easy, specially pronuntiation, that is a terrible for English, with so many vowels.
Currently Spanish is the second most spoken language, after Chinese. But English is still first second laguage for most people.
- bluGill 7y agoI agree. Spanish is not perfect. It is the best alternative that I personally know of though (outside of constructed languages, which have other problems)
- enriquto 7y agospanish is also the language with the most illiterate people in the world
- narag 7y agoThat's just a statistics artifact. None of the 25 countries with the most illiteracy ratio speaks Spanish. Anyway, why are you mentioning it? It's unrelated with the article or the thread.
- mdpye 7y agoMy experience of learning Spanish as a second language was that there are actually relatively few true irregularities (e.g. ser), and that most of what our tutors referred to as "irregular" were actually regular in their irregularity (e.g. vowel shifts like dormir). I even found after a bit of exposure, I could guess which verbs would take which vowel shifts fairly accurately. And there are, what, ~16 verb tenses, ~8 of which are compound (ancillary verb+participle: easy to learn) and several are very rare in common discourse. Personally,if I had to pick a universal language based on how easy it is to learn, I'd definitely pick Spanish!
- narag 7y agoOnly two are obsolete, the other 14 are commonly used. Oh, and there are two with a second optional form to compensate :) In English it's mostly done with mandatory pronouns and ancillary verbs (have, should, will) and only present tense is different for third person, everything else is just the same. Of course the pronuntiation and the phrasal verbs ruin the party. You must be very proficient already, so you don't realize how many irregular verbs there are. I won (ex aequo) a competition at school and it was very hard. Ser (to be) is specially pathological, stealing from ir (to go) half its conjugation, but hardly the only common irregular verb: have, go, say, walk, want, put, know...