Selecting a new language for study

Post Reply New Topic

My son who is in the 7th grade has to select a language to study next year. The choices are German, French, or Spanish. He couldn't make up his mind as to whether he wanted German or French. He finds English grammar challenging and the sound of Spanish annoying.
German either comes from English or vice-versa - I don't know. I think he'd be better off taking French. Does anyone care to comment on the difficulties of learning a language. His native language is English but he finds the grammar really hard.

i found german easier than french, it's closer to the english language i think

I've studied both French and German, I preferred French.

I want to learn Italian and Polish

I don't know what continent you are on, but for North America, considering current population trends, Spanish would be the most useful for a competitive edge in the employment world.

I learned French rather than German at school (was random allocation. I learned German as an adult). I found it difficult because it felt embarrassing adopting the French idiom. I believe German would have been easier because the sounds are more masculine and closer to how I speak English. German grammar is probably harder than French, it has some rules you have to really get your head around. If he's a natural actor who easily adopts characters then French would be easier, otherwise German.

i wanna learn japanese!

From my perspective, the easiest of the three languages is spanish. The grammar rules are kind of confusing, but it's not as confusing as the other two. The pronunciation of words in french is difficult for me and the rules for compound words in german are confusing to me. I taught myself to speak some swedish, which in my opinion is one of the easiest languages for a native english speaker to learn, despite that you have to memorize which rules to use for the different forms of every individual word. But it's not very useful for an American, like myself, who doesn't know anyone else who can speak swedish. Also, more than eighty percent of the population of Sweden can speak english so it's not nearly as useful as spanish, german, or french. Right now I'm trying to teach myself to speak russian. Aside from the fact that russian uses the cyrillic alphabet instead of the latin alphabet which we use in english, russian seems to me like it's easier than german and french, but probably not spanish. I haven't spent much time teaching it to myself, but I am good at quickly picking up on the different alphabet and memorizing the spelling of basic phrases. I'm not sure if I want to pursue russian though because I have attempted to learn to speak croatian, which I thought would be easy to learn because there are no sounds in croatian that we don't have in english, but the suffix rules are extremely confusing. It's kind of similar to russian, but it uses the latin alphabet. I thought about teaching myself to speak czech which uses the latin alphabet, but I decided to go with russian instead because it's similar and more people can speak it. It's also nice that russian doesn't have the sound that an r with a caron makes like czech does, which I have a hard time pronouncing. The suffix rules of czech are different from english, but I can easily understand them and they're easier than the suffix rules of the slavic languages like croatian. I'm hoping that the suffix rules of russian are more similar to the suffix rules of czech than croatian.

I'm in the process of learning German right now, and I'd say it's a lot easier than French (my attempt at that didn't go so well). If your son wants a challenge, then I recommend French. If he wants something a little easier, I'd go with German.

If he speaks English how does he struggle with English grammar?

I don't think it is like sports. I think it's like your native language. I don't think it's possible for someone to be grammatically poor in their native language. If the meaning was the kid doesn't know the technical names for ... oh I can't be bothered.