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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This quote from Black Swan has been very helpful in allowing me to justify my compulsive book buying:
"The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary."
Great quote. Black Swan happens to be one of my unread books. You've propted me to pick it back up.
More generally, I feel there's no reason to buy books before I need to read them. Effectively Amazon has become my library. Need a book - $10 and you can pull it off the shelf and into your Kindle.
This saves my back when moving too. I have about 650 books in my Kindle library. 90% read in entirety. Moving those would suck!
> Over all, though, about 25 percent of cancer in women and 33 percent in men was potentially preventable.
This article is a rather optimistic spin on these numbers. I'd have said "a large majority of cancer cases--75% in women and 67% in men--were not preventable"
Oh, I don't know. On the one hand, part of me agrees with you.
On the other hand, when someone tells me that they've optimized a compiler and it can now compile 3% faster I get really excited and pull their repo, I don't turn around and say "you mean 97% as slow" and keep complaining about how long compilation takes and how nothing can be done about it. Show that there are steps you can take to cut it by 33% more than we currently know how and you'll be a god among programmers.
I agree with your basic point - but doesn't "3% faster" usually mean that it runs faster in all cases? So the "97% as slow" does not seem to be clear. Maybe it should be said as the improvement is not significant enough according to some numerical threshold?
I think it's closer to "I boosted conversion rates on our sign up page by 33%."
Sure, not every visitor signs up still, but some group of people found the new copy compelling enough to sign up - with no new, very expensive feature development.
> About 82 percent of women and 78 percent of men who got lung cancer might have prevented it through healthy behaviors.
Back of the envelope: ~20 percent of all cancer deaths are lung cancer deaths that wouldn't have happened without smoking. That leaves just 5-15% of cancer deaths being "potentially preventable" once you've given up smoking. (Here, I'm not distinguishing between cancer cases and cancer deaths; please point to better data if you have it.)
I'd wager less than 5% of cancer deaths are preventable if you neither smoke nor are overweight.
I think this article, and especially its headline, is highly misleading.
Thank you. This entire 'study' is nonsense because this recruiter has no idea how 'strong' these candidates really are. She only thinks she knows, just like every arrogant jerk who's ever conducted a technical interview.
