Yeah, I was just doing a quick and dirty count of the tenses. I have a less than high school education and sometimes English is like Greek to me. 😵💫
Portuguese has been a whole nother world!
I’ve hit a wall so I’ve backed off of Portuguese and started a little Spanish. Related languages but different enough to be challenging. I’ll probably go back to Portuguese in a couple of months and review everything and start studying again.
I’m retired and I find it keeps my mind busy and helps pass the time.
they are so similar as to be confusing in written form.
but I believe for english speakers spanish is considerably easier to learn to speak/understand. what you see written is more or less what you hear. iberian spoken portugues is almost unintelligible coming from a latin american spanish background (or at least it was for me), and brazilian is a challenge as well given just how different pronunciation is.
I guess deciding which of the Romance langages to learn would depend on how you might use it. Of course there are lots of other languages and families of languages to learn too. Russian and Arabic come to mind these days. With German family heritage I tried German as high school freshman, but the grammar and “the” completely destroyed me and I quite. Sophomore year I started Spanish, and “the” was much simpler. Then it was direct and indirect object that gave me a lot of trouble until something clicked. I did 2 more years and decided to major in Spanish in Csollege. One semester I was taking spoken Spanish and French and grammar translation Italian, interspersed by 2 science courses to clean my mind between classes. Then Sputnic flew and I decided to be a science major. I subsequently got a job as a bilingual Spanish/English secretary for an international NGO with a 10% bonus for the second language. In later years I was self-employed and renovated property. Spanish was extremely useful since US education has sadly neglected educating our native born citizens in the construction trades.
So I would say it is important to think about how you might use whatever language you choose to learn. I was interested in travel and was thinking Latin America. In fact in the NGO job we also had a chance to study some Brazilian Portuguese as we had offices there and I had to read letters and see to whom or what files they should go. If you have to deal with renovation or construction in the US, Spanish will be useful. If your heritage is Portuguese you might want to make that your first Romance language. Travel or research goals would also be a consideration for what language to study.
As to difficulty, I agree Spanish is much easier to speak or write as it does sound like it spells. Italian is also easier in that regard. Portuguese and especially French are a lot harder to pronounce and spell, although French has somewhat more words that are now included in English. Verb endings change a great deal more in Romance languages than they do in English. I was surprised to discover that Subjunctive verb forms are used almost half the time. Having grown up with a first generation German/American mother I see that is a very different life viewpoint. What a difference there is between mother’s “”clean out the garage, and that’s an order, and a Spanish “I hope you get the garage cleaned today.” The German mind expects the garage will be cleaned. The Hispanic mind hopes the garage “might” be cleaned today, In the first case Indicative verb endings are used, in the second case Subjunctive verb endings are used. The two past tenses also require constant monitoring while speaking Spanish. You always have to decide if the past action is permanent or temporary but perhaps ongoing.
Its amazing that little kids can do it but we adults find it much harder, but still fun if you can share your learning with others. My husband was training for a foreign job. This was when Castro was taking over Cuba, so he had to learn Spanish. Then problems started in Africa and they wanted him to learn French. Finally he ended up doing a survey in Brazil and he had to learn Portuguese. I had a South American friend with a brother who wanted to learn English. He and my husband spent many hours together sharing their ignorance of the other’s language, but learning as they went. Once he told them I could not visit because I was sick from eating too much cake. The fact that cake and poop sound similar in Spanish caused him to make an amusing mistake. Another time he was saying “I can’t,” which when mispronounced is “I fart.” He finally spent 4 months traveling throughout Brazil and Peru. Brazil was a more fun job than Peru.