However, don't forget the IR (to go) verb. My friends had some hard time trying to learn its past (fui), present (voy) and future (iré) And there are too many forms for my taste.

But you only have to memorize two extra words/verb (past and past participle). In Spanish you have to remember the full conjugation of 8 (IIRC) simple forms. That's 8x6 = 48 words/verb. Plus gerund (equivalent, more or less, to Engligh -ing form) and past participle.

When ReyBrujo said "fui", he actually meant "fui, fuiste, fue, fuimos, fuisteis, fueron". And he only mentioned past, preset and future, but that's not all of them.

Why not try Lojban instead? Much more logical (some would say too logical) and (virtually) not Eurocentric.

Hmm... I think we use usted/ustedes. Instead of saying Mañana caminareis por aqui, we would say Mañana caminaran por aqui. In informal situations Uruguay and Argentina replace usted with vos (like [vos] podes venir mañana?), in formal ones we use usted. Instead of vosotros we use ustedes even in informal speaking, though it is mostly ommited ([ustedes] pueden venir mañana?). And we replaced vuestro with su/suyo, even in formal situations, leaving the vuestro to very formal situations, like writing to an authority, or maybe when looking for a job.

Japanese is an inefficient language. It has too few sounds, meaning you need more time to convey the same amount of information. Remember Mojo Jojo?

Latin is the language. All it needs is some more up-to-date words added to it, and it would rule.

Hehehe, but our vos isn't like your vos. In example, you would say Vos sos Oscar? instead of the more formal Usted es Oscar? or the correct neutral version Tu eres Oscar? (which is not used at all here, it sounds strange). Unless you can use vos as my example there; we are taught down here that vos used in that way is a corrupted spanish form only found in this area.

Ah. Then the voceísmo (as we call it down here) is not using vos, but removing the terminations of the verbs (sos instead of sois, habes instead of habeis, corrieron instead of corristeis, etc).

My lesson for today

Hmmm... looks like an intermediate file from some obscure compiler... me likes obscurities...
The German writer Morgenstern once wrote a speech that is made up out of 2 sentences. The first one is an elaborate greeting. The second one is made up so that the last third of it consists of only auxiliary verbs resolving subordinate phrases. It does technically make sense, but read aloud, it's just blah blah blah können würden gehabt zu haben zu sein zu können zu dürfen wollen gemacht zu haben wagen.

Anyway, I've heard that:
- Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are extremely easy in terms of grammar; pronunciation is somewhat odd at times, but perfectly doable
- Mandarin Chinese has been rated the easiest language in the world by some UN committee. It has no declination, no conjugation, no tenses, no gender; basically, every mode change of any word is achieved by adding extra words. I don't know zip about this, but I found it interesting.
- C is not useful to communicate between humans; it was designed for a very specific mode of communication, and provides little possibilities to use other modes.

And finally: The discussion about which language is most useful as a "world language" is rather futile. Time will tell. I vote for Chinese, though. Not because it's so easy, but because China has an unbelievable economic growth and will probably soon be one of the most important economic powers in the world.

Not necessarily. Less sounds means recognition is easier and can be faster, which in turn makes faster speaking feasible.

On the contrary. Imagine a language with only two sounds, say: "la" and "li". The size of words grows quickly as you need to convey more meaning, and the language will consist of words along the lines of "la", "lali", "lilila", "lalilalali" and so on. Now imagine speaking this language quickly; recognition becomes impossible as a flurry of a few almost identical sounds rush by. Having more sounds makes the language easier and faster to understand, in fact; the larger available permutations of sounds a word can consist of makes recognition much, much easier.

Yes... ermmm... I was helping the "Magic Kings", yeah, that was it ("Reyes Magos". For non Europe (or maybe just non-Spanish?), it's our equivalent Santa Claus, but they are three instead of just one )

Yeah, those ones.

Essentially, yes. But learning the characters can be painful. Even worse, with simplified Chinese it has become even harder to infer the meaning or pronounciation of a character from its composition. The inflections aren't too hard to learn, as there are only four tones (as opposed to as many as seven in other dialects of Chinese).