> Overall, it's one of the easiest languages to master.

I'm with you on almost everything else, but the fact that it is such an unwieldy, awkward language means that a ton of communication is by idiom (that just has to be memorized, that's where a lot of the "vocabulary" is), and an enormous amount is allowed to be assumed and left unsaid (aggressively "pro-drop.") Also, the fact that sentence word order is just conventional in Spanish as opposed to strict like Germanic languages or French means that you can do whatever you want with it with the same literal meaning but giving a different connotative impression. Spanish is a great language for poetry but a bad language for communication. Extremely expressive, but not as expressive through the means of vocabulary choices.

The fact that in English you can't just move the words around for emphasis or association means that we need more words, but the fact that our words aren't mutating a fraction as much in order to indicate their function, instead using position, means that any sound put into a particular position will serve that position's function. You can just quack like a duck for the verb, and let people figure out what that noise means the subject is doing. If ducks used the Roman alphabet, English would also just accept the duck spelling without changing it, and use the fact that you don't know how duck words are pronounced as a class marker.

But I think (native English-speaking) people vastly underestimate how difficult English is to read and write. Spanish is easy to read, and almost as easy to write. If you spell a word wrong in Spanish, it probably means that you're also saying it wrong. If Spanish is a 2 in reading difficulty and Chinese characters are an 8, English is probably a 6.

I think the people here denying that Spanish is a small language and that English is an absurdly large language are being guided by the "Law of Averages." Languages being smaller or larger isn't an indication of virtue or grace. It makes literacy a nightmare and is used to discriminate by class and region. English has an excessive number of words that duplicate each other, and as a result (and as a German) so many (and a variable number of by region) vowels that a phonetic written English is a pipedream.

English and Spanish have different grammatical and sound characteristics that allow English to take on new vocabulary casually, and allow Spanish to have a vocabulary largely circumscribed by the RAE (w the Mexican supplements [edit: and the unwritten Chilean one.]) Those characteristics also mean that you could teach an adult Spanish illiterate to read well in a month, and for an adult English illiterate it will take years. English (and French, and Portuguese, and Chinese, and Japanese, etc.) are horrible languages for reading and writing.

If say English number bigger than Spanish number, no need get mad.