[gordaco]

I'm Spanish and I'm curious about what you said. I feel that English has much easier grammar than Spanish (just think of the verb conjugation in both languages!), but much more difficult phonetics (just how many vowels do you have? Is there really a difference between "backwards e" and "upside down v"? Half-kidding only); so I can write in English far better than I can speak. I expected that a native English speaker learning Spanish would have the same imbalance sensations that I had, just reversed.

By the way, I found that learning German was far easier than English. I wish I had time to keep doing it.

[thaumasiotes]

> Is there really a difference between "backwards e" and "upside down v"?

They're called schwa and wedge. This is actually a discussion I've had (not particularly fruitfully); schwa, being a reduced vowel, is sort of notionally only available in unstressed syllables. So you'd want to say a stressed syllable uses the wedge. But indeed they don't seem to be pronounced differently for many people, or at least not differently enough that there's an obvious answer. Merriam-Webster seems to use schwa even for stressed syllables like "stuff".

[WildUtah]

"just how many vowels do you have?"

Twenty to twenty-eight. Depends on the accent and dialect. Of course, it can be a different set of twenty-eight in different contexts, depending on accent and dialect.

"Is there really a difference between "backwards e" and "upside down v"?"

Not in Utah.

"English has much easier grammar than Spanish"

I don't really agree. English uses phrasal verbs instead of reflexives and circumlocution in place of most subjunctives, but they're just as complicated.