Do you find that learning Spanish has hindered your French (or vice versa) ?

[mh57]

Both Spanish and French are similar and often times I've heard how learning one can negatively affect the other. What are your thoughts?

[cefmac]

Definitely not. I learnt Spanish the same year that I studied Advanced French in school and if anything, being able to speak both helped immensely as the grammar follows similar rules and a lot of the vocab is similar too. I got high As in my exams for both. The prounciation and spelling is very different though, so it's not like you can look at a Spanish word and think it's French, and vice versa. Knowing Spanish made Italian easier as well, but there was a lot more confusion between languages as they're more similar than French and Spanish!

[thekernel]

Before I started taking Spanish in high school, students were required to take a certain number of years of French. I was oaky at the French language, but I disliked it very much and I switched to Spanish as soon as I could. It felt like Spanish was a lot simpler; way less accents, every letter in the word is heard as it is written, and the enunciation rules just made way more sense.

Perhaps what made me so able to learn Spanish was through a tougher language.

[tulosai]

Adding a voice to the 'definitely not' camp.  I only know a TINY bit of Spanish but what I know I actually learned with great ease while living in France.  Since the grammar is essentially 100% the same, it was actually a great boon to me to know French because I could pretty much stick in Spanish vocab and not worry about much else.

[pojokers]

YES. I think my Spanish knowledge is hindering my French studies.  The way you pronounce words in Spanish compared to French differ so much in my opinion. I am a completely new French learner but this has been my original thoughts.

For example if I look at the question:

Comment vous appelez vous? (What is your name?)

I always want to sound out every letter, like you would in Spanish but that is very wrong. There a lot of tricky words and sounds very unique to French. It reminds me of the complexities of English at times. I've been studying hard lately and I'm slowly training myself but I'm going to have to say yes to your question.

[wannalurnspanish]

In college I majored in Spanish for one semester in my junior year. (I switched the following semester for various reasons - I regret doing that.) Anyway, I needed an extra class, because I switched majors and dropped various others classes, so still had a few more credits to be considered full-time. It was late in the registration process and few class spots were open so I decided to take a French class at my advisor's suggestion.

I actually found French fairly easy vocabulary-wise. A lot of it is very different but for some reason it really clicked. The problem I have now is, acquiring the French accent totally has ruined my Spanish accent. When I speak Spanish, I totally realize I've slipped into a French accent. I think -ion words are the worst. I'm not quite sure how to fix it, other than maybe to spend more time listening to native Spanish speakers.

I totally envied that professor's children though. The guy was Syrian, I believe, and his native language was Arabic. I guess they all learn English in school over there, so he knew English too. He decided to study French so went to France to do so, and there met the woman who would become his wife. She was American, there studying French. Anyway, eventually they moved to the US.

Now, here comes the cool part. Once they had kids, they decided that, when she was alone with her kids, she would speak English to them. When he was alone with the kids he would speak his native language. When they were all together as a family, they spoke French to their children. So their children grew up knowing three languages. That's pretty awesome in my book!

Sorry, totally went off on a tangent there, but had to share. The French thing reminded me of that.