I kinda have beef with Spanish. I received actual education on Spanish in school. I don’t pay attention to the lecture much, but I get the whole concept pretty well. Here are some reasons why Spanish kinda sucks and Portuguese just mogs in terms of… everything.

Stem Changing Verbs

In no world should there be anything that serves as a base, yet often gets changed up a lot to something that serves as a “default.” Like, there is the verb poder which transforms into puedo, puedes, puede, and pueden, but then the only exception is podemos. Make it make sense. The pronunciation’s also uncanny. For a language that supposedly has evolved overtime in order to be written and spoken easier, this has become harder. I don’t think any linguist nerd would agree that o isn’t shorter than ue and that o is harder to pronounce than ue. Here’s the chart.

o, u	ue
e, i	ie
e	i

I don’t think Portuguese has this so-called “feature.” Once it’s there, it stays. For example, in Portuguese, a poder can be posso, pode, podem, and podemos. It actually makes sense. Sure, the d changes when it comes to the verb for I can, but the root still remains unchanged and the majority of the result actually follows the base. It’s also easier to pronounce and takes less time to be executed.

The weird “n” obsession

If you tried to repeatedly pronounce “un” within a span of time, you may twist your tongue or become fatigued. The Spanish use the “un,” while the Tuganese uses the “um.” This involves less of a tongue, but more of what you are already used to and what the human body is capable of making the conversation flow a lot more. You can also see this difference where in Spanish, it says, “poden,” but in the Tuganese, it says, “podem.” I think this

The weird “N”

We’re talking about Ñ. “Enhe.” In Spanish, they clutter it up with unnecessary symbols for something that can already be represented with two letters. It makes it harder to type on a standard keyboard, and causes inconveniences by having you hold the N to get the Ñ on the keyboard. There are many ways to represent this: nh, nj, and even ny. The Tuganese, however, did not follow this unfortunate pattern the Spanish had followed. Instead, they used nh. Of course, there are squiggly lines on mostly vowels in Portuguese, but there are no other vowel letters that can be used to replace the nasal A, O, or anything like that.

What do I have to say?

Learn Portuguese, not Spanish. It’s worth it. It’s serves more of a traditional and convenient language to learn if you want to get into the Romance languages.