Spanish difficulty

Continuing the discussion of the difficulity of Spanish.

Furrykef:

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<< The difficultness or easiness of the subjunctive is based on statistics not in the fact that you may find it easy or difficult. Most of people who study Spanish find it difficult. >>

My point is that if the subjunctive is difficult, something would have to make it difficult. Nobody's yet told me what exactly that is. I'm not going to pretend that I get it right 100% of the time, since I rarely get anything right 100% of the time in Spanish due to my inexperience, but I don't see anything hard about the subjunctive once the basic principles are understood. And I don't find the basic principles hard to understand either.

The subjunctive usually follows simple patterns. Take the following sentences:
* Creo que tiene razón.
* No creo que tenga razón.
* Le dije que lo hiciera.
* Es cierto que soy feliz.
* Es bueno que seas feliz.
* Hay duda de que sea así.
* No hay duda de que es así.

I think if you understand why the subjunctive is or isn't used in each of those sentences, you already know something like 90% of all there is to know about using the subjunctive.

- Kef
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Guest:

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Those are simple cases though, try reading prose and it becomes MUCH more arbitrary, stylistic, imparting particular feeling and mood.

On the other hand, what is difficult in the reflexive pronoune 'se'? I think it is extremely logical its use.
Of course, I don't mean the subjunctive is EXTREMELY HARD, but it's not EASY. Surely you have simply learnt it well, but then what part of any language is EXTREMELY HARD if you are willing to learn it well (except for characters, of course :) ]
Another difficulty of Spanish is regional varieties, there are a huge number of words with different meanings in different countries.

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Continue discussing and posting opinions.

I still don't know why everyone thinks Spanish is so easy. Why is it simpler than French, for example? I may be biased, but I found Spanish to be a whole heck of a lot harder than English :)

Doesn't Spanish have hundreds (thousands?) of stem-changing irregular vebs. You could also add all those spelling-change verbs, although I suppose many folks would consider these regular.

Only answers is Spanish thanks. It's so easy...

Spanish is very much like French with respect to difficulty , but at least it has phonetic spelling.

Why is it simpler than French, for example?

Isn't gender mainly predictable from the noun ending in Spanish, whereas it isn't in French?

Gender is not very predictable in Spanish:

hombrE : masculine

nubE: feminine

I think that Spanish has a flaw with respect to genders, it lacks neuter gender. It would be interesting to reintroduce the neuter gender and also a few more to distinguish animate vs inanimate.

>>Gender is not very predictable in Spanish:

hombrE : masculine

nubE: feminine <<

I believe this kind of thing is the exception rather than the rule.

If a Spanish name ends with a it is pretty sure that it's feminine, but if it ends wth E chances that it is masculine are only 65%, so there is room enough to unpredictability.

OMG, you keep on going with this shit? stupid Spanish-bashers, you asked me for proof of it, I did, but of course you're not gonna acept it, I'll put it again, and this time I'll quote some important sentances:

http://usono.wordpress.com/what-is-this-language/
"Esperanto is the easiest language in the world to learn. It is estimated that it is five times easier to learn than Spanish, ten times easier than English, and twenty times easier than Japanese"

"I am not particularly good at languages. I took German for four and a half years, both in high school and college. I got good grades in it - generally A’s - and yet I cannot read even the simplest of news stories written in German. And, since English is a Germanic language, German is probably the closest foreign language to English that there is.

I took three years of French, and also got good grades in it. And my French is much worse than my German. Pathetically bad, considering how much time I spent on it.

After two weeks of studying Esperanto for from fifteen minutes to half an hour a night (on my own), I was - with the help of an online dictionary - able to read most news stories written in Esperanto without any real difficulty"

"In English, for example, when you learn the word “cat”, you also have to just remember that a baby cat is a “kitten”. When you learn the word “cow”, you simply have to memorize the fact that a baby cow is a “calf”. When you learn the word “mouse”, you have to remember that there is, in fact, no special word for a baby mouse (or, at least, not one that most people know). If you didn’t already know English, how would you ever figure out that “kitten” comes from “cat”? They don’t even start with the same letters!"

"Calf - Calves. Uh… this is not the same. Where’d the “f” go? There’s a “ve” now? Wha’? At least we still add an -s.
Mouse - Mice. Okaaaaaaaay. The “ous” turned into “ic”. And we remember this? (Sadly, yes we do. And even sadder, these kinds of weird rules make English very difficult to learn."

And what about words ending with a consonant, you have no idea about which the gender is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti

"Ghoti is a constructed example used to illustrate irregularities in English spelling. It is a respelling of the word fish, and like it is"

"It has also been noted[3] that many of the irregularities that do exist in English spelling serve to preserve the word's history and etymology. For example, the word "electrician," in which the ci is pronounced /ʃ/ due to palatalization, retains a linkage to its root "electricity," which would be lost if the different forms of the word were spelled "elektrishun," "elektrisity," and "elektrik."

The /ʃ/ sound itself can be spelled eleven different ways:[4] shirt, sugar, chute, action, issue, ocean, conscious, mansion, schwa, anxious, and special."

I've read your damn link and at any moment it says:
"Esperanto is the easiest language in the world to learn. It is estimated that it is five times easier to learn than Spanish, ten times easier than English, and twenty times easier than Japanese" "

<<"In English, for example, when you learn the word “cat”, you also have to just remember that a baby cat is a “kitten”. When you learn the word “cow”, you simply have to memorize the fact that a baby cow is a “calf”. When you learn the word “mouse”, you have to remember that there is, in fact, no special word for a baby mouse (or, at least, not one that most people know). If you didn’t already know English, how would you ever figure out that “kitten” comes from “cat”? They don’t even start with the same letters!"

"Calf - Calves. Uh… this is not the same. Where’d the “f” go? There’s a “ve” now? Wha’? At least we still add an -s.
Mouse - Mice. Okaaaaaaaay. The “ous” turned into “ic”. And we remember this? (Sadly, yes we do. And even sadder, these kinds of weird rules make English very difficult to learn.">>

and in what way is this HARD or DIFFICULT? It's not, those are exceptions.
All languages have exceptions, Spanish included.

at least kitten resembles cat and also calf does with respect to cow. But in Spanish you have:

conejo (rabbit) gazapo (baby rabbit)
vaca (cow) ternera (calf)
cerdo (pig ) lechón (baby pig)