French is harder to pronounce than Spanish, and the irregularity of French spelling makes it even harder. On the other hand, Spanish grammar is quite a bit more complicated than French grammar.
In the long run, though, these little differences are insignificant compared to the truly time-consuming part of learning a language: the vocabulary. French and Spanish are about equal in the difficulty of learning vocab.
This quote from Black Swan has been very helpful in allowing me to justify my compulsive book buying:
"The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary."
> Over all, though, about 25 percent of cancer in women and 33 percent in men was potentially preventable.
This article is a rather optimistic spin on these numbers. I'd have said "a large majority of cancer cases--75% in women and 67% in men--were not preventable"
Thank you. This entire 'study' is nonsense because this recruiter has no idea how 'strong' these candidates really are. She only thinks she knows, just like every arrogant jerk who's ever conducted a technical interview.