Selecting a new language for study

Post Reply New Topic

Personally, I chose Spanish because I live in southern California where it's a good idea to know it *coughillegalimmigratscough* and I am Hispanic on my mom's side.

I took three years of Spanish in high school and another semester in college. I live in Texas, so Spanish would be a very useful language for me to learn in this part of the country. However, I don't know where you live. I don't have any experience with French or German outside of the media, so I couldn't comment on those two. However, Spanish is very similar to English in a number of ways. It wasn't really difficult to learn at all (even though I am far from fluent in it).

The grammar structure of Spanish is very simple and straightforward, not like English at all. If your son has difficulty with English grammar, then he actually might find Spanish grammar easier. I'm not trying to steer your son to take any particular course of action, I'm just putting in my experience. I hope I was helpful!

I can tell you the following features of the two languages, perhaps these could help your son decide.

Both German and French grammar are hard, but in different ways.

German word order in a sentence is far more flexible, the downside is that you have to learn a lot of word endings (that have the grammar in them) which make this flexibility possible.

French word order is quite rigid and perhaps that almost helps, but if you get deeper into French there is a lot more hard grammar to come.

French however has the added difficulties of the pronunciation and the way words are run together in a sentence at high speed. Plus you have the nasals to contend with, and a lot of grammatical forms are silent (ie not pronounced only written).

German is easier to pronounce, a bit more ponderous , and the words are more clearly defined entities in spoken German. Apart from a handful of combinations of letters that you have to know you basically pronounce most or all of the letters you see.

I don't really know why you guys say Spanish is easy. I've learnt some French and although it's sort of tricky I think it's not difficult at all. And its pronunciation doesn't take that much to learn. It's as hard as Spanish. A friend of mine is French but was raised up in Spain since she was very young. He says you easily start speaking French, but thinks Spanish takes longer to master. Even Spanish people make many mistakes.

German is much harder than the two of them in my opinion. It's difficult to get used to its grammar, but the sentence structure is limited, there aren't as many possibilites as Spanish has. However, the lexicon is pretty difficult to acquire.

I must add I know lots of English people who live in Spain and they speak incredibly poorly even after many years.

1. Spanish

2. French

3. German

Latin and German.

Do you want it to be fun, or challenging. If it's fun that you're looking for - French, Spanish or Italian seem fun to learn. If you're looking for a challenge, I've read from some members that Chinese and Japanese are very challenging to learn.