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Comment by eloisant | Hacker News Reader

Coming from French I don't consider there is any conjugation in Japanese. The verb is the same no matter what the subject is - I, you, he/she, we, plural you, they... So in French you can multiply by 6 the number of verb ending. In Japanese you never have to care about gender and plural.

Same with German, where you have declinaisons on the articles depending on their grammatical position in the sentence (den/der/dem/etc.)

So maybe Chinese is even simpler than Japanese, but I would still rank Japanese as a language having a "simple" grammar.

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There's conjugation but it's on different axes.

One unusual feature is that Japanese verbs conjugate on politeness/formality.

There's also te- forms, past forms, imperative, "I can verb" form, "I want verb" form, "I must verb" form, causative, etc, etc.

The low number of irregular verbs is a blessing though.

Portuguese has something like 50 different verb endings, Wikipedia tells me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_conjugation

In reality few people use half of these, I would think

My favorite bit is that "to be" is two different verbs entirely in Portuguese, "ser" and "estar". Both Italian and Spanish also have this distinction, but in my (admittedly limited) experience with those languages, neither really makes the distinction as clear as it is in Portuguese

I don't know about Italian but the ser/estar distinction works in pretty much exactly the same way in both Spanish and Portuguese. I can't think of any difference between how Spanish and Portuguese treat those two verbs.

You're right, I stand corrected. I guess I've been hearing too much Italian lately

Actually most if not all of those verb endings are used colloquially (the most important exception would be the second person plural, which is only used in some regions of Portugal).

2nd person singular is also never really used correctly, and even 1st person plural is sometimes replaced by 3rd person singular e.g. "a gente vai" instead of "nós vamos"

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