To think that Spanish is a ridiculous language?

[Ammadam]

Sorry to any spanish speakers. But I just wanted a mimor moan.

I've lived in France and Italy before. I thought the French and Italian languages were totally fine. They make sense. I became quite good at speaking Italian with the locals.

I'm in Spain on holiday. I've come to Spain many times on holiday, and so I'm always trying to learn Spanish a bit.

It's just such a crazy language.

Why is every word so long. Why are there so many changes for every word. Why does it sound like babble. Add to that, it's spoken extremely fast. Apparently it's the second fastest spoken language.

I was actually just talking about this to some Spanish people at a group here. They agreed that it's a very difficult language.

They said that everything is said in a much longer way than in English.

For example "Star wars" in Spanish, is "la guerra de galactica"

One thing I would say about Spanish is that
Voy means I go, you can drop the Yo (or Me) so in such cases it IS really important to get the verb ending right so its clear WHO goes BUT in English if we said "I goes" it would be obvious who goes if if it were gramatically incorrect.
It can also be tricky as adjectives are changeable too - so for example the word "black" would be written 4 different ways when describing cats depending on how many cats there were any what sex they were.
Having said that Dos Gatas negro would be understandable if not correct.

I was very proud of my 120 day Spanish streak in Duolingo before going to Spain last year (I speak reasonable French and fluent Italian), only to find it didn't get me very far in Northern Spain. Not only do they speak very fast, we ended up in Bilbao, where my carefully crafted enquiry to a bus driver was answered with a wordy rant - in Basque 🤦‍♀️.

But I don't know how you can say Spanish is long winded in comparison to Italian OP!

You’re right about the features that are simple in English, but as a primary teacher I am reminded daily of the sheer craziness of our spelling and pronunciation system. I can still remember my astonishment many decades ago when I learned that the number 1 is spelled ‘one’. It didn’t, and still doesn’t, make any sense whatsoever.

Incorrect, several people pointed this out before I even made an appearance, and you kept saying it can’t be wrong.

Do you always believe what others tell you? Perhaps look it up first before making any claims about a language you don’t properly know. I do that even with English, after 15 years speaking it!

Fs.

Again you seem to have completely missed the point, where I wrote that a local Spanish person told me that was the title of the movie in Spanish.

Can you read?

Maybe that's what they call the movie locally , in their city.

Who are you to judge a local spanish speaker.?

I write what a spanish person said to me.

Yet I get shouted at about it.

Make that make sense

I don't think the Basque / Gallego / Catalan speakers would be happy about their languages being called a "dialect" tbh, all three are different to Spanish. As a Spanish and French speaker I can usually understand Catalan. Gallego has more crossover to Portuguese and Basque is on a planet of its own.

It's fairly clear though that the OP is talking about castellano Spanish.

Spanish is phonetically consistent so you don't get the read/read rubbish you get in English. A huge bonus.

It takes time to learn. Like everything else.

I find my good GCSE in French gets me round in Spain - there are a lot of similarities. I prefer German because although there are a lot of rules, it doesn’t deviate from them so once you learn them you’re sorted. It’s also almost entirely phonetic which makes pronunciation a doddle once you learn the rules. But Spanish isn’t a patch on other languages for difficulty - Mandarin or Hungarian?!

I struggled a lot with Dutch. I can get the gist of a lot of written things because of my German skills, but I find the pronunciation is incredibly difficult!

Well done on the 120 day streak!

I remember my son being delighted with himself reading "Iceland" and I said no chicken that's island. Silent s, he goes ok what's Iceland so, well it has a c, and then the e to make the I sound. So what makes the I sound in island. Then I have him a chocolate lolly to stop breaking my heart and thanked God that I grew up speaking English because I don't know how you'd learn it.

You were the one who started it!

Maybe you could have said difficult - but ridiculous is well, ridiculous...

The OP is quite correct if their point is that Spanish is more difficult than English for ignorant people who already speak English. I think that's indisputable.

The only people who might possibly qualify to call a language 'ridiculous' are linguists with a profound knowledge of that language and several others. From anyone else, it's a silly remark. And pointless. Millions of Spanish speakers around the world are not going to change their language to make it easier for you.

Today I learnt movie titles have local names, by cities 😂

You said in your original post I think, that Spanish is one of the fastest spoken languages in the world. Which is correct.

Could it be… that you didn’t catch the right spelling from how the local Spanish speaker pronounced the movie title for you?

Which region of Spain was this in / where is the person from? In many Spanish regions, the s, z, ce/ci and x sounds are muddled up and pronounced differently than “standard” Spanish. As guerra de las galaxias has both x and s sounds, do you think it could be possible they pronounced in the local accent, or just said them too fast for you to catch the sounds correctly?

I’m sure this person isn’t dumb and just drops the use of grammar when he speaks, like you describe…

Also - leave the Star Wars argument, both of you. It’s not going to be resolved and you’ll just get wound up.

Are you a native English speaker?

I can't imagine someone who has learned English as a secondary language would think it easier (or more regular) than French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Greek.......

I’ve learnt French, German, Italian and Spanish.
Italian and Spanish to me are the easiest of the 4. Both in grammar and in pronunciation.
I would hate to be a non English speaker and have to learn my language. Our language doesn’t make sense at times with different pronunciations for words that have most of the same letters eg cough, though, borough

PS who shouted? It seems like you just didn’t expect people would disagree.

Yes it's thar it's spoken so fast, that makes it so difficult aswell. They also slur the words into each other.

So when I was in Italy, I could understand the Italian being spoken to me, as it was not spoken not too fast.

I come to Spain, and Spanish is spoken at machine gun level. The spanish people told me that a lot of regions in Spain cut off the start and end of some words, to speak even faster.

Just because you can't figure it out doesn't mean it's ridiculous, just means it's too difficult for you. 💁‍♀️

I find it an ugly language to listen to. It's the th sounds.

Agree. Finding learning something hard and blaming the thing is bizarre to me. If it was Chinese I’d understand it. Locus of control op.

They are sadly referred to as dialects.
I live here. My DD is Spanish and has to learn two of these languages. I teach Spanish children.

If the OP was in Valencia province or Andalucia (where many scenes were filmed) she is correct that it can be referred to as that here.

I disagress it is a hard language. But youwill not be understood everywhere.

I'm a local British person. "Star Wars" in the UK is known as "The Fight About The Universal". As you are so convinced that anything any single Spanish person once told you must be true, I imagine you will accept this also. Otherwise you'd be judging me, a local English speaker, and everyone knows nobody can ever be wrong or lie if they're local.