English vs Spanish: The Alphabet

There are similarities and there are differences between the English alphabet and its Spanish counterpart.
Both include consonants and vowels.
The English alphabet has twenty six letters: 21 consonants and five vowels.
The Spanish alphabet has also five vowels but we have an extra consonant, the torch bearer of the Spanish language, the Ñ (pronounced like enye) so Spanish has twenty seven consonants really. There used to be more, but not so long ago LL and CH are no longer considered letters.
If only for that I would say Spanish is richer but then there is something to consider about English and that is the number of possible sounds some of its letters have.
Let´s take as an example the vowel U which in each of the following words has a different sound: Umbrella, hUt, ThUrsday, sUperman, University.   There are probably more than thirty five independent sounds without even considering diptongs.
In other words, English has one letter less but it has more sounds, and perhaps that makes the difference

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