The
two most popular languages offered in any language schools are French
and Spanish. Choosing any of the languages can be compared with
choosing the flavor of ice-creams. Neither flavor is better or worse
than the other. Here are 5 considerable points before choosing the
language.
- Number of native speakers and countries: Spanish is the primary language in 20 countries and one dependent entity, totaling around 442 million people. On the other hand, total number of French speakers is 338 million. French enjoys the official status in 29 countries and as the Administrative/Cultural language in 9 more countries- Algeria, Cambodia, laos, Lebanon, morocco, Mauritius, Mauritania, Tunisia, Vietnam. Only English and French are spoken in all five continents.
- Usefulness to non-speakers and to learn another language: Portuguese speakers can understand spoken Spanish without much difficulty. But Spanish speakers cannot even recognize the very similar Portuguese words because of the different pronunciation rules of Portuguese. Both spoken and written French are distant language for Spanish and Portuguese speakers. And Spanish can be understood by the french speakers if they complete the elementary level of Spanish. It is widely said that, French speakers learn Spanish and Italian easier than Spanish and Italian speakers learn French.
- International organizations: Spanish is one of the six official languages of UN but all its agencies but The Secretariat use two working languages- English and French. Spanish and French both are among the 23 official languages of EU. But the European Commission conducts its internal business in three languages- English, French and German. Apart from English, French is also co-official language in most of the international organizations. Spanish is the official language of only a few organizations that do not give French the official status. Otherwise, French shares the honor with either English or Spanish.
Countries with Spanish as an official language
Geographical distribution of French language
- Similarity with English: French shares the large number of vocabulary with English, though the pronunciation is different. Regarding sentence structures, having a good command in English helps form sentences in French but not all french expressions are easy to translate. Spanish grammar is not that much similar to English. Spanish vocabulary is more similar to Italian and Portuguese. Comprehension of Spanish by French speakers who have not studied the language is lower than 50%. But it is much lower for the English speakers.
- Difficult sections: As we know, 4 sections define the knowledge of any language- speaking, listening, reading and writing. According to the students of elementary level, French is easy to speak, read and write but difficult to understand while listening. On the other hand, first year of learning Spanish goes very smooth since Spanish is written phonetically (you write as you hear), but difficulties arise in upper levels as Spanish grammar is more complicated than French grammar.
Now
you make your choice.......
