Spanish or French?

[caters]

I don't know which one to study first. I know they are both Romance languages(latin based) so they will be relatively easy. I am in college and I don't need to know a foreign language for the degree I plan to get so that isn't a problem.

 

I like French better personally(maybe it is because of the accent but nevertheless I like French better). But French is much less common in the USA and while I have wanted to travel to France ever since I was 9 years old(so that is for me, about 9 years of wanting to travel to France), I have never gotten to go for these reasons:

 

1) My parents keep saying they should get me a passport but then forget and so I haven't gotten a passport

2) My momma keeps wanting to go to further north in Europe(specifically Ireland and Scotland)

3) My dad keeps wanting to go to Alaska(he doesn't mind the arctic)

4) Expenses, Even if I could go without a passport, it is still very expensive for just the flight itself not to mention that I would have to convert my dollars to Euros in order to buy anything in France(or a lot of Europe really).

 

So I figured that if I do learn French, than maybe I can find at some point, a French speaker who lives in Ohio that I truly love. But the third most common language in Ohio is German so that may be hard.

So anyway, if it comes down to these 2(I am not so sure about studying German, I mean "Nine" for "No", "Die" for "The", etc. plus the fact that in German you can keep compounding words until you get a very complex word in German for which you would need a whole sentence to say the same thing in English just deters me from German), which one do you think I should study first, French or Spanish?

 

[miguel1018]

Hey bud,

I have been taking Spanish classes since kindergarten, so I may be a little biased, but I'd say learn Spanish first. I have not studied French that much, but Spanish is quite straight forward. It's a phonetic language, meaning a word is almost always pronounced the way it is read and spelled, and there are absolute rules for stressing the correct syllable, which are only negated with the presence of an accented vowel. I attempt to present Spanish as the "easier" language because if you learn all the words and conjugations in the mode of Spanish first, you will have a larger archive of words that you can make connections to when learning similar languages in the future. Especially if you're learning French after this. 

On the surface, Spanish seems to be very fundamentally different from English, but the deeper you dive into Spanish the more and more often you encounter cognates (words of two different languages that look similar and have similar definitions). 

Hope you come to a decision soon!

[Wanda]

I learned French first, when I lived there many years ago. The last 1 1/2 years I've been studying Spanish. Both are wonderful languages.
However, I'm going to suggest Spanish to you, because it's more useful. There are way more countries where they speak Spanish. It's considered one of the most important languages, together with English and Chinese.