[apolretom]

French is harder to pronounce than Spanish, and the irregularity of French spelling makes it even harder. On the other hand, Spanish grammar is quite a bit more complicated than French grammar.

In the long run, though, these little differences are insignificant compared to the truly time-consuming part of learning a language: the vocabulary. French and Spanish are about equal in the difficulty of learning vocab.

[cryptonector]

French has more conjugations (mostly because it has more subjunctives) than Spanish. Spanish has something like 4k irregular verbs, though most of the irregularities are... regular (there are several common forms of irregularities), so it's not that bad. On the whole I think French is significantly harder to learn than Spanish.

English, is very difficult, I think, though obviously not as difficult as, say, Finnish.

Most languages have complexity somewhere. Chinese languages have Chinese ideographs. Japanese has Kanji (Chinese characters), two syllabic alphabets, romaji (Latin character set transliteration), and things like "counters" (alternate endings for counting words depending on what sort of thing you're counting -- there are over 1,000 different counters!).

The complexity in English mostly lies in all the borrowed words and the rather loose rules around the language (like French, the rules have lots of exceptions, though in French the exceptions to the rules are almost infuriating in number), the rather not-very-phonetic prononciation, the lack of stress marks, the large variation in accents.

[simias]

>French has more conjugations (mostly because it has more subjunctives) than Spanish.

Are you sure you're not mixing that up? Or are you talking about more irregular forms of the french subjunctive compared to the spanish counterpart?

French only uses present subjunctive (past subjunctive is very archaic) while Spanish uses both present and past. Also subjunctive is used in many more constructs in Spanish than in French.

French also doesn't use the simple past/preterite outside of literature, instead preferring the passé composé (constructed like the present perfect in English, but the meaning is that of the preterite). That's fortunate because the passé composé is a lot easier to conjugate. Spanish and Portuguese however do use the preterite even in the spoken language.

I wouldn't say that English is very difficult either, if only because of the extremely simple grammar. Pronunciation is messy however, I agree.

[cryptonector]

The verb conjugation books I grew up with had more subjunctives for French than for Spanish. Whether some are considered archaic, I'm not sure. I don't buy the thing about simple past tense -- I use it, though admittedly not very much, and anyways, if it's used in writing then it's used. There are tenses in Spanish that are not used much depending on where you travel -- if you consider all the variations by Spanish-speaking countries, of course, Spanish starts to look significantly more complicated than advertised!

As for English, I think that there are fewer patterns for growing minds to hang onto than in Romance languages. But that's just a feeling born of my experience; I'm not entirely sure.

[BuckRogers]

It's the other way around, Spanish has more conjugations and subjunctive forms. That's all academic anyway, the most important metric is that more verb forms are used in commonly spoken Spanish than French. In practice, Spanish is more complex from a conjugation perspective.

[ekianjo]

i dOnt think there are 1000 counters in Japanese, you are clearly exaggerating. when you know about 20 of them its far sufficient for daily situations even if there are more.

And romaji is not used much in Japan expect in print media just to look cool or something. Actual articles and posts never use romaji but instead a mix of kanji and kana mostly.

[cryptonector]

When I lived in Japan I was told there are over 1,000 counters, and that one's mastery of them is part of how people determine one's level of literacy. Perhaps only about 20 get used all the time. And certainly you can get away with using only the default counter (but you'll sound illiterate).

Romaji is also used on signs and other material aimed at foreigners -- Japanese people generally can read romaji because, after all, they are taught English in school. Romaji is not much of a cognitive burden, I agree, since it's very simple, goes along with English, and there's only one romanization.