Spanish orthography is pretty regular, but then you have 42 inflections per verb for three different patterns, and the most important verbs are of course highly irregular. Not to mention the fact that the difference between ser and estar isn't easy to learn. And there are a few more things that are hard (limiting to pronunciation: the guttural j/g, and the rr; counting syllables is a recurring question in quizzes).

> It wasn't chosen, America just won

That doesn't make English a bad language. Perhaps America (I guess you're referring to the USA) won because of English is so easy.

But cultural, financial and political influence obviously count.

Before English, French was the international language of diplomacy, and it was very influental in science and humanities. Spoken French is as simple as Spanish at a glance. The writing system is peculiar, but still much more regular than the English one.

I think an appealing thing about English is the ridiculous vocabulary. When it doesn’t have a word, it just steals one from another language. We have a French-based word that’s a “fancy” way to say an English-based synonym from the court vs common language situation with the Normans. Then borrowed liberally from Greek and Latin during the enlightenment, and every other language when colonialism kicked in (including a lot of botched Spanish). That constant borrowing is partly why our spelling is insane.

Oh and add to the insanity that we’ll borrow the same French word twice, frozen in each time.

It’s fascinating to see the language evolve through eg India. It’s a secondary language that fills a gap to provide a commonly understood language in a region with massive linguistic diversity. But then it’s developed it’s own regionalisms that are bleeding back into regions where it is the primary language.

It’s kind of like shell scripting to me. It started simple, got random useful things tacked on over time. You can’t formally define it, but it’s pragmatically powerful. And there aren’t real rules despite people trying so hard over the years, just conventions that shift and change. And often the “rule makers” just make things more complicated in the end with only some of it sticking.

I highly recommend the English History Podcast for anyone interested.

There's also the budding euro-English, which is kinda funny because it is to some extent the revenge of all the words we've stolen from other European languages and then slowly turned into false-friends.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English#Vocabulary

Anyway as an American I'm always in favor of just giving our language away to anyone to do whatever they want with it, really just go nuts, especially -- throw some z's in there, they really add some pizzazz to the language. (Just ignore the British, they will try to get you to change them back to s's... but you can see what that does to the pizzazz!).

Totally agree. I love that it’s the gumbo of languages. Throw whatever you want in there. I’m down.

And as an American I reject the British pronunciation of “herb” and “lieutenant.”

Every language steals words from other languages. Heck, eastern Asian languages have stolen an entire script from English (pinyin).

There’s nothing unique about English in this regard.

The stealing isn’t unique for sure. But most of the vocabulary in our language is borrowed words. Mostly just the “sight words” kids learn in early school is what remains of Old English. And many English words are the rougher equivalent of a borrowed, nicer words.

Most languages were pretty calcified by Old or Middle English, and English doesn’t seem to be letting up. But no language is static.

But with tech and mass communication, English is squeezing into many languages.

Pinyin is kind of weird. It’s not borrowing concepts, but lending itself to translation in and out. Based off prior western attempts and observation of Japanese success. Typesetting is more practical, and then computers really push it… the latter I feel awkward about. 1/2 is the typesetting benefit, 1/2 is eurocentrism. I dunno. Maybe I’m overthinking.

The vocabulary is more interesting to me because it’s importing ideas or nuances around ideas. It’s primarily nouns, though.

Learning other languages is great to see the world differently. Even in just French, which is fairly close: eg faire doesn’t have a real English equivalent, but makes total sense. It’s like how I learn programming languages I’ll never use for work, just to see things from their perspective.

I don’t know enough about Asian languages. Working on fleshing out my history knowledge now from Asian perspectives vs what I got in school. Maybe one day I’ll be brave enough to address a language.

Spanish has its own obstacles. Like all the conjugations and the subjunctive. Or how verbose it is.

Meanwhile compare it to English tense grammar like I did run, I do run, I will run.

I don’t think technical language comparisons are all that enlightening about which one is “best”.

I have been running, I had been running, I will have had run, I would have had been running

English has a large amount of tenses as well, and if I were you I wouldn't discount the English subjunctive either

"I will have had run" and "I would have had been running" are not sensible. Perfect tenses indicate completion. If you try to "stack" two copies the auxiliary verb "have" to make some kind of double-perfect tense, it doesn't make any sense--it makes no more sense than saying "I wented to the store" or "I ated the food." There are reasons you can have utterances like "had had" in English, but it typically involves the other meaning of the word "have" (the non-auxiliary meaning), like "I had had steak, and James had had lasagna, but we both were still hungry."

Subjunctive may be interesting to analyze, but it's not an additional form of the word.

By my count, English has 12 tenses. You cannot just invent new ones, because people won't be able to understand you. They are fairly regular: present, past, and future, which can be modified by making them perfect, continuous, or both.

"By next month I will have had run 50 km" - is there a BETTER way to say this sentence? It refers to the past from the prism of next month, but also RELATES it to that point in time

"If I had continued boxing professionally, I would have been running 50 km a week" Here's it's a conditional, I think I stuck an extra had in there by accident.

By my English textbook there's 16 tenses, 4x4

Past, present, future, future-in-the-past (would) x Simple, continuous, perfect, continuous-perfect (have been V-ing)

Point being, English grammar is far from simple, as this conversation clearly demonstrated

> "By next month I will have had run 50 km" - is there a BETTER way to say this sentence?

By next month, I will have run 50km. This means that "I run 50km" completes first, and then next month arrives afterwards.

> By my English textbook there's 16 tenses, 4x4

Depends on how you count tenses. Different textbooks will give different counts, depending on what is considered a "tense". Which is not a reflection of the complexity of English, but a reflection of how hard it is to come up with definitions for terms in linguistics. "Would" is often not counted as a tense, but it may be counted as a tense, particularly if you are explaining English to speakers of a language which have a tense expressing something similar.

> Point being, English grammar is far from simple, as this conversation clearly demonstrated

Most languages are far from simple, I don't think English deserves special attention.

Spanish has a similar amount of tenses, some expressed in inflections, others through auxiliary verbs. Spanish doesn't have the obsession with the gerund ("I go home" is fine), but has (im)perfect past, plusquam perfect, and future tenses, combinations (no habría pensado: wouldn't have thought) and conditionals in all, just like English. They just don't correspond 1-1.

The subjunctive in English is a bit of joke in comparison to the Spanish one.

I'm not saying English has no nuance beyond my example.

But this relatively simple grammar is English's strength. Consider how you translate your examples into other languages, especially the future hypotheticals that aren't a trivial concept to communicate period yet the rules for producing them are still simple in English.

Spanish (at least some European variants) definitely has the "th-sounds" though. But similarly to English, it's not terribly important to get them right. The variants spoken in South America use sibilants instead.

Oh yeah, I studied Latin American Spanish so I did forget that Spaniards do have these sounds. But the vowel number is clearly smaller. The hardest sound is probably the "rr" rolling r

In English it's probably distinguishing between a number of vowels like BAD/BED or PULL/POOL, and words like STRENGTH that really test the limits of Mandarin speakers