Nope. Spanish is admittedly far more phonemic than English, but there are plenty of exceptions, eg. the letter "x". And of course Spanish writing completely ignores the huge dialectal variations in pronouncing "ll", "c", "z" etc.
However, English grammar is much simpler than Spanish grammar.
So true.
Learning Italian and Spanish as a native English speaker is daunting because of the sheer number of verb tenses and irregular verbs you must master:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_conjugation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conjugation
The other challenge is learning the correct gender for inanimate objects:
https://learnitalian.web.unc.edu/home/nounsarticlesadjective...).
Who would have guessed that a motorcycle is female:
https://www.webspanish.com/blog/spanish-lesson-se-dice-el-mo...
It is like some form of patriotism?
Genders and verb tenses are hard if you choose to see them as that. However, what I do is treat the gender part of the word I'm learning. The same thing with learning Chinese and seeing that the tone is part of the word and shouldn't be seen as separate.
Literally any language you chose to pick up a book on grammar will feel daunting. Realistically, you don't need to "learn" most of it. If you keep learning how to speak the language the grammar will come naturally.
Think about it like this, Japanese is described as one of the harder languages to pick up and learn. However, does a Japanese speaker automatically find it easier to learn Spanish because that's described as an easier language? I'm sure if they open a book on Spanish grammar they'll also feel completely overwhelmed.
This isn't exactly correct. We have all the same tenses, it's just that in English these tenses are more frequently created using separate words, rather than a modification to the infinitive verb. Since modifications to the infinitive verb may not work on all infinitive verbs, this results in more irregularities in Spanish.
For example, the future tense in English takes the infinitive verb ("to pay" or "to eat") and adds "will" before it ("I will pay", "They will eat").
In Spanish the future tense take the infinitive verb ("pagar" or "comer") and modifies the ending--but the endings are different, so they have to be modified differently--the results are similar but different enough to matter. And there are different conjugations for the subject as well. So:
I will pay => Pagaré They will eat => (Ellas|Ellos) comeran
If you know the future tense for "pay" in English, you can easily construct the future tense of any infinitive verb for any subject ("They will eat", "He will run", "You will go"). But knowing "Pagaré" teaches you nothing about how to conjugate even the same infinitive for a different subject, let alone other infinitives.
In general I don't believe it's true that every language has exactly the same tenses, I think they actually can vary.
Chinese, for example, has no tenses.
When it comes to counting tenses of languages, people disagree on how many there are. For example consider English. https://www.englishclub.com/grammar/verb-tenses.php offers 12. But as noted there, it can be argued that there really are only 6.
Spanish is usually said to have 16 tenses, but there is again some wiggle room. See https://www.busuu.com/en/spanish/tenses.
If you were very strict about only looking at the single word, English stays very simple (do=infinitive/present plural, does=present singular, doing=progressive, did=past, done=arguably not a tense because it's an adjective). If you look at it in this way, Spanish obviously has more tenses--they have six different variations of just the present tense, for example.
But that doesn't capture the whole story because English does have all those tenses, English just doesn't do it in one word. Notably, there's no future tense in the one-word variations, so nobody reasonably will argue that the above is all the tenses.
And that takes you to a complicated place because you can do multi-word variations in Spanish, too, and sometimes those are functionally the same (what's the difference between "voy a pagar" and "pagaré"?).
And if you start allowing for multiple-word tenses, then there's a virtually unlimited number of constructions possible, and any limitation you could place on this is completely subjective. For example, your link doesn't list "I will have had been doing" as a tense, but it's obviously a grammatically correct construction with a real use--the only reason for not including it is a subjective judgment that it's too uncommon.
And critically, you can do all of those in both languages, it's just a matter of how many words and how awkward/uncommon the construction will be. The different structures of the languages lead one toward preferring certain structures ("pagaré" over "voy a pagar" in Spanish, while one would likely say "I'll pay" in English because there's no one-word option). But to represent these as different tenses is pretty subjective and maybe a bit silly.
The one thing I'm aware of that Spanish can do that English can't is communicate formality with a conjugation, i.e. "tú" form versus "usted" form, but I'd argue that's not a tense, because "tense" seems to be about the the temporatlity of the verb and that's a modification to accommodate the formality of the subject of the sentence.
But that said, the fact that you CAN communicate something, doesn't mean that you did it through a tense. I already pointed you at Chinese, which has NO verb conjugation at all, and therefore is often claimed to have no tenses. What does it do instead? It has words for things like past, yesterday, tomorrow, and so on. Once one of those has been used, this is a context that is assumed to continue holding through your conversation until someone says something else. Then you continue in that new context with no grammatical cues to remind you of the timeframe under discussion.
See https://www.thoughtco.com/mandarin-timeframes-2279615 for a more detailed explanation of how this actually works in practice. But it is clear that treatment of time is grammatically different as you go across languages.
But if that's a claim that Chinese has no tenses, I guess it somewhat comes down to what you consider a tense, then. Because if it's just about forms of a verb, I'd have to say that English has no future tense, for example, leaving us with probably... three tenses? Present (do), past (did), progressive (doing).
But nothing I've read treats tense that way.
To me a tense is the way you normally and automatically construct the grammar of a sentence to implicitly convey a specific idea about time. Without saying it explicitly. So "I went to the store", "I went to the store yesterday", and "I went to the store last week" are all the same tense. Because you've communicated "past" through the grammar without having explicitly said it. And it is clearly different than "I am going to the store" or "I will go to the store".
The Chinese form, by contrast, all look like, "I go to store". And the words saying whether it was somewhere in the past, yesterday, last week, now, or some time in the future need be nowhere in the sentence. It is enough that they were explicitly said at some point.
And this is specifically something that Chinese people struggle with in English. You constantly will catch them making mistakes like, "I go to store yesterday." Because the idea of conveying time with grammar is as foreign to them as the idea that objects have gender is to English speakers.
But would you think they are, that if you can communicate the same things about temporality in all languages, then that means "all languages have the same tenses"? I guess that may indeed be a semantic argument on what it means to "have a tense", but that seems an idiosyncratic meaning of "tense" to me.
But then, what do you do with the simple non-controversial fact that Spanish has both past imperfect and past preterite, and English does not? Sure you can use a "past progressive" construction in English like "was walking" to, in some cases communicate the same or similar thing -- but you can say "estaba caminando" in Spanish too -- or you can instead, more commonly, say "caminaba". You have an extra choice in Spanish, an additional grammatical form with an additional shade of meaning, that does not exist in English. (and "caminaba" isn't always, or even usually, translated to English properly as "was walking", but could probably more often just be "walked" too.)
This seem to be a pretty clear counter-example to the claim that all languages have the same tenses? A simple one, with an everyday construction, from a common language. (for all languages, I'd want to look at some obscure ones too!). Now, it doesn't mean that "caminaba" is untranslateable to English, there are several differnet ways you might translate it depending on context, to try to get the point across more or less ("was walking", "used to walk", "Back then I would walk", etc, and in many cases though just "walked" is fine, "I walked to work everyday") -- which is true of all translation. But this gets back to--are you actually just trying to say that all languages can express the same ideas? That's also a somewhat controversial claim, but, I think, an entirely different and broader one than "all languages have the same tenses", but can be true even if all languages don't have the same tenses.
Eh... if I had to make a claim to argue for I'd just claim that tense isn't really a clear communication of an idea that actually exists. If it's about conjugating words, then English has, what, 3 tenses (do, did, doing)? If it's about temporality, English has virtually infinite tenses, although at some point they become unwieldy ("will have had been going to have been doing"?).
> But then, what do you do with the simple non-controversial fact that Spanish has both past imperfect and past preterite, and English does not? Sure you can use a "past progressive" construction in English like "was walking" to, in some cases communicate the same or similar thing -- but you can say "estaba caminando" in Spanish too -- or you can instead, more commonly, say "caminaba". You have an extra choice in Spanish, an additional grammatical form with an additional shade of meaning, that does not exist in English. (and "caminaba" isn't always, or even usually, translated to English properly as "was walking", but could probably more often just be "walked" too.)
Sure, but again, doesn't English have that sort of thing? Isn't there a subtle difference between "I will pay" and "I'm going to pay", even though pretty much everything I've read would list these both as the future tense? Is that subtle difference really a "tense" or is it just that there's a separate word?
"A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed."
See https://emmawilkin.com/blog/2020/2/17/a-rough-coated-dough-f...
Ok, so not 'written exactly as pronounced', but pretty close, especially compared to English.
But what human language does not have exceptions to the rule? Or irregular conjugations or forms?
>> ignores the huge dialectal variations
Most dialects could be considered separate languages with varying degrees of shared ancestry. For that reason, I am not including dialects in my generalization.
Orthography Write Read
----------- ---------- ----------
ar 84.3 ± 0.8 99.4 ± 0.3
br 80.6 ± 0.6 77.2 ± 1.6
de 69.1 ± 1.0 78.0 ± 1.5
en 36.1 ± 1.5 31.1 ± 1.3
eo 99.3 ± 0.2 99.7 ± 0.1
es 66.9 ± 2.0 85.3 ± 1.3
fi 97.7 ± 0.3 92.3 ± 0.8
fr 28.0 ± 1.4 79.6 ± 1.7
it 94.5 ± 0.8 71.6 ± 0.9
ko 81.9 ± 1.0 97.5 ± 0.5
nl 72.9 ± 1.7 55.7 ± 2.2
pt 75.8 ± 1.0 82.4 ± 0.9
ru 41.3 ± 1.6 97.2 ± 0.5
sh 99.2 ± 0.3 99.3 ± 0.3
tr 95.4 ± 0.7 95.9 ± 0.6
zh 19.9 ± 1.4 78.7 ± 0.9
Another possible explanation: perhaps their ANN model was incapable of working across word boundaries? (The "n" in "en Bolivia" is pronounced like "m": it's perfectly regular and a simple rule but you do have to look beyond the current word.)
EDIT: When I write "exactly as it's written" I mean, of course, that you compute the pronunciation from the spelling by applying some simple rules. For example, B and V are pronounced the same way, and that way depends on the context, but the rules are very simple: they can be expressed in a few hundred words. Also, I don't consider an overly formal pronunciation to be "incorrect" for the purposes of this discussion!
It seems to be mainly about whether the widely adopted orthography was specifically designed with phonemicity in mind, and whether enough time has passed since then for the pronunciation to diverge (e.g. note Korean - Hangeul was perfectly phonemic when originally designed, but it isn't anymore after >500 years of language evolution). Modern orthographies are more likely to stick for longer though because speech is much more uniform today thanks to universal education and mass media.
It also helps when the government steps in. Serbo-Croatian is this way thanks to the efforts of Vuk Karadžić and Ljudevit Gaj being adopted by the corresponding ethnostates as official. Turkish Latin orthography was literally designed by committee to pursue a political goal, and then heavily enforced top-down.
So it's not really about "phonemic" in the traditional sense where graphemes directly correspond to phonemes. The more accurate description of the generalized metric is "how unambiguously graphemes map to sounds", which is still meaningful even if the mapping is very far from 1:1 as is the case for Chinese. Also, if I understand correctly given what CEDICT is, they basically used pinyin as phonemic transcription (instead of IPA, like for other languages) - i.e. as output.
But then again, actual alphabets do this kind of thing too. E.g. Belarusian orthography is almost completely unambiguous (Taraskevica might actually be completely unambiguous even?), but you have quirks like e.g. "я" meaning either /ja/ or /ʲa/ depending on the preceding character, whereas /a/ in other contexts uses a completely different letter "а"; I believe this would score as high as Serbo-Croatian by their metric, although strictly speaking it's less phonemic, because the mapping is not 1:1. So if Chinese characters generally have consistent pronunciations, it ought to score relatively high for reading.
Also sometimes an s will be written as a z. I found some workers' markings under the paint in my bathroom that said "de el pizo" (from the floor), with floor (piso) misspelled.
Still, Spanish is better then English about this by a country mile.
It's still far, far better than English.
But also, the page you've linked to is misleading - it says that Spanish B/V is [b] (bilabial plosive), while in practice it's [β] (bilabial fricative or approximant) in most positions, with [b] as allophone. The phoneme is conventionally written as /b/, yes, but that does not directly correspond to pronunciation.
Some regions still make that difference, at least senior people do. I had a language teacher from old Castille who sound her spelling of v and b very clearly. She made the distinction between 'll' and 'y' clear as well, with 'll' sounding as a modified 'l', a cross between 'li' and 'ye'.
Just wanted to point out that the variation of sound is not random, but with the sound tied to the letter. Also Spain has something that English does not, which is an official organisation studying the language and making official rules recognising how it's used at different contexts and zones.