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Comment by tatqx | Hacker News Reader

Totally makes sense, but Spanish is still one of the easiest languages for learn for English speakers. So if you are planning to learn a new language, do give Spanish a try. One of the best books for learning Spanish is - Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish. French is a little more difficult, and German is way more difficult. Probably that's another reason for the difference in the returns over time?

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Spanish has been destroying the dreams of Esperantists and others over the years who hope to build a more regular, orderly, and easy to learn common language based on common Indo-European roots.

Turns out that it's dang hard to design anything easier or more accessible to speakers of any European language than Spanish already is. The spelling and pronunciation are already completely regular and predictable. The grammar is straightforward and common to almost all European tongues. The vocabulary is mostly based on Latin with some Arabic variety thrown in, but it's been standardized over the centuries so that a lot of it has a simpler and more natural morphology.

It's a great second language: it's fairly easy, the world's second most widespread tongue, and spoken in warm countries with very friendly natives. Unfortunately, it's not likely to provide you with many lucrative opportunities. Remember, money isn't everything.

Esperanto has two problems: Spanish and English. Spanish was what Esperanto wanted to be, English did what esperanto wanted to do.

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.

"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.

> 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".

Yeah, Spanish is pretty easy for Anglophones. Afrikaans is super easy for Anglophones to learn also. The syntax and pragmatics of Afrikaans are nearly the same as English. There are some new words, sounds, and orthography to pick up, but honestly the orthography is the hardest part. There aren't nearly as many resources to learn Afrikaans as Spanish, though.

Edited to add: Most Afrikaans speakers will tell you that Afrikaans is a dying language. That didn't stop me -- it's not much different from a programmer picking up Modula-3 just for the fun of it.

also Afrikaans is the only other Indoeuropean language without noun genders!

Persian is also an Indo-European language with no noun genders: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_grammar

Did not know! Thanks.

Odd you'd say that. Though I'm not a native English speaker, I found Spanish to be among the hardest languages I've come across (more so than Modern Greek or German), and I come from a French background with wide knowledge across all of the Romance board. I'd expect a English speaker to struggle even more than I did.

(The easiest language being English, due to exposure, extreme alienation by French a few centuries back and overall simplicity for the more casual ranges of speech.)

English has some good features:

  * Limited number of glyphs is a killer feature for the keyboard age
  * No noun genders to remember
  * The informal 2nd person ("thou") got chased out of common use centuries ago, along with its verb conjugations
  * Reasonably forgiving sentence structure

Its too bad the spelling and pronunciation are such disasters.

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