[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.