More students are studying Spanish than French, but which should you learn?

This is the first year that Spanish has overtaken French as the most popular A-level language. As uptake of French fell by 4.1% (8,355 entries), Spanish rose by 4.5% (8,625 entries).

I have studied both languages, French through the formal route in school, and Spanish in my own time. Learning a language is no small commitment. We learned our own mother tongues through a process of memorisation, refinement and correction that we weren’t even conscious of, and we essentially have to force ourselves to do the same thing again. Yet it can be thoroughly rewarding too. If you are thinking that French or Spanish might be for you, here’s my personal take on the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Greatest number of speakers: Spanish is the clear winner.

Yes, the lovers of all things French will point out that there are many countries where French is used, from Africa to North America. However, it is often a second language. It will certainly help you to get around Morocco or Tunisia if you can speak some French, but you’ll probably here Arabic and other languages spoken in daily life.

Even in those Latin American countries where higher indigenous populations preserve many native languages, Spanish is dominant.

Having said all that, there’s no denying the enduring cultural prestige of French, the so-called language of love. In tsarist Russia, for example, it was spoken by nobility and to be conversant in it was regarded as an indicator of high social standing.

To this day it retains its sense of je ne sais quoi. The running joke of Dell Boy’s mangled attempts to demonstrate his linguistic prowess would simply not be funny if the scriptwriters had tried instead to pull off the same gag with him attempting Spanish.

My only advice is that determining your language choice based on its number of speakers is a bad move. In English, I already speak a language spoken by over 350 million people, with many more highly proficient in it as an additional language. I can get by quite comfortably as the typical anglophone monoglot. I simply don’t have the capacity to speak to 350 million people. I’m currently learning a language spoken by only 10 million. I can’t possibly get to know 10 million people either.

If a language is needed for your job or is spoken where you intend to stay, or you simply enjoy it, that’s a good enough reason. French and Spanish will delight you in equal measure. If it’s only for 1 speaker, and that person is your partner, close friend or key professional associate, it’s worth the time you invest.

Masculine and feminine: what’s all that about?

The idea of inanimate objects having a gender seems crazy to us native English speakers. Not only that, but it creates a massive learning headache, seemingly regardless of which European language we try to crack.

So the bad news is that gender exists in French and Spanish. The slightly more encouraging news is that, regardless of which language you learn, it’s not as alien to the English speaker as it first seems. Gendered nouns do remain to a limited extent in our language: waitress, actress or mistress are all examples of noun forms that can only describe a woman. Second, we give certain entities gender for emphatic or poetic effect. Consider how countries or grand boats are referred to as “she.”

Now the rules in Spanish and French are also pretty similar: gender and pluralisation affect the endings of adjectives, noun spellings and choice of definite and indefinite articles. For me, therefore, there is little in this: it’s a concept that, once understood, can be gradually mastered in each language.

As a general rule, I find spelling in Spanish vastly more predictable, and the distinct ending changes and articles mean that identifying gender from speech is probably a little easier in Spanish, but there’s not much in it.

Verbs, verbs and more verbs: which language will truly verb you out?

The famous language teacher and one of my own true heroes, the late Michel Thomas, always said that verbs were the backbone of a language. Since he claimed to speak 11 of the things, he probably should know.

Every sentence has a verb. Mastering the conjugation and ordering of verbs in all its tenses, has equipped you with all the grammatical building blocks to learn your language. So which is easier?

French verbs start out tricky, but they don’t get that much harder as you work through more complex compound tenses.

Once you’ve mastered the various patterns, particularly of the ir/re verbs, and realised that some of the most commonly used verbs are completely irregular, you already feel quite a sense of achievement. Mastering the past tense, and learning how to determine an avoir or être verb, doesn’t feel like a mountain bigger than the one you’ve already climbed. French verbs don’t hide their complexity.

Spanish lulls you in with a present tense that is extraordinarily easy. Even irregular verbs are, in the main, not all that irregular. The perfect past is similarly a doddle.

But come the imperative and its weird pattern switching, the simple past (in French this is out of use except in literature) and the subjunctive, not to mentioned dialectal variations in the second person familiar, and Spanish verbs reveal that their head-spinning potential was just a little better hidden.

Verbs are hard. Latin languages express many more sentiments through changes to the endings of verbs, rather than simply adding words as we do in English and other Germanic languages. That’s the culture shock that will come with either language, if you’ve never tried learning a foreign language before.

Incidentally, you can get any verb fully conjugated in hundreds of languages by heading to www.verbix.com

Speech: how much will I understand?

Sorry Spanish speakers, but French is easier in this regard. Both languages are spoken at a very fast pace, but Spanish speakers are in a league of their own. Combine that with a beautiful diversity of accents and you have something that sounds charming and delightful, but utterly impossible to understand.

Many people are traumatised by that experience in school. Our friends in other countries grow up surrounded by English.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t have to make a lot of effort to learn it, and it doesn’t excuse our hopeless failure to be similarly dedicated, but it does mean that it’s probably more stimulating and enjoyable. Sitting in a class, with 95% of the words spoken washing over you completely and staring at a textbook teaching you how to say “I play model bricks” simply doesn’t inspire anyone. I admire my language teachers, who somehow managed to be outstanding despite having to deliver this tedious rubbish.

It just doesn’t need to be like this, especially with the advent of translation technology that can get you actually saying and reading things that are interesting right from the start.

No-one expects their 2-year-old to understand every word on the 6 o’clock news, but they know that she will be able to do so eventually. It’s silly that our learning philosophy assumes that we can do that when trying to replicate the process as adults.

What we can do is listen and enjoy the beautiful sound of our new language. We can read simple things, like children’s books or the news headlines . We can take note of the words we see and hear most, gradually building up the bank of words that eventually lodge themselves in our memory.

I know it’s hard to be kind to yourself when learning a language. We have to fight the frustration that it’s not coming to us fast enough, or that however hard we are trying it always feels like there is so much more to do.

I sometimes still feel like a total beginner when confronted with a wall of Spanish that goes straight over my head. But then again, I’ve learned how to ask some-one to speak more slowly. We’re not aiming for an end goal, but we’re on a journey that gets more exciting as it goes on, and as it falls in to place.

Finally, no matter which language you learn, there are so many rewards for all the trials. When you get through your first conversation and are understood, nothing is like it! When you start to speak and write without digging out your verb books or dictionaries, you realise that it’s sinking in. When you listen to the music or engage with the media in your new language, you realise that you’re learning so much more than words, but about a culture and way of life.

Every language, unique in its construction, is an awe-inspiring, intricate tapestry, woven and shaped over so many years. Unpicking it not only gives you an appreciation of its amazing elegance, but of the wonder of language itself, and how intimately bound up the way we think is with how we are moulded and programmed to say things.

Challenging the fundamentals of what we say, why and how we say it, means that the rich meaning of words is never taken for granted again. We look at the world with new perspectives and fresh eyes.

That’s what it is to know the meaning of languages. That wonderful truth can even inspire someone like me: an English monoglot that’s able to get by in a few other languages and is still silly enough to occasionally think that the question of whether French or Spanish is harder, actually matters one jot.