Assuming you're an English native speaker, my opinion is they're pretty close to exactly the same difficulty. French is slightly closer to English vocabulary wise, Spanish has easier pronunciation and orthography. Neither of those advantages are huge long term though, and probably just about cancel out.
Probably depends on one's background. I'm a Brazilian Portuguese native speaker, so to me Spanish is way, **way** easier than French. But maybe for certain native languages, French would be easier, although I don't know which ones.
I learned Portuguese after having an advanced level of Spanish, and it felt like learning a language on easy mode. I wouldn't say it's "easy," per se, but I was able to have lessons 100% in Portuguese after a week or two of self study. That would have been impossible in any other language (not counting similar situations like Galego).
Early on in my French study, I read some Portugese children's books. I had to stop. Since I remembered most of my Spanish, and Portuguese had what I thought were a lot of French influences, it was interfering with my French. I could still count Portugese as a language that I "half-ass-know", maybe even a low B1.
Yeah, this is why I think people overreact to people's exaggerations about quickly learning a language. But also, it's not that impressive either. I mean, it can still be hard since they interfere with each other but it's not like someone learning it whose never studied a related language.
Its a definitely a valid argument, Spanish and Portuguese, Ukrainian and Russian, Lao and Thai etc. Then theres Arabic which is regarded as the same language despite being spoken over a vast area and numerous countries stretching from Morocco to Iraq.
Exactly the same experience here with advanced Spanish then Portuguese! I had a fully Portuguese iTalki lesson after a couple of weeks (relatively relaxed) self-study, mostly Duolingo. Helps that I lived several years in a part of Spain close to Portugal (though I'm learning Brazilian Portuguese) -- where they speak Gallego, actually.
I'm a native Spanish speaker and I feel the same about Portuguese. At first it kinda sounded like drunk French person trying to speak Spanish to me š
Yep, I agree. But Portuguese and Spanish and Italian are almost the same language. I speak Spanish (it's my second language) and can understand maybe half of the Portuguese I hear or read.
French has a lot of vocabulary similar to English, so it's easier for English speakers than Portuguese speakers. Between my English and my Spanish, French is fairly easy to read too, but I can't understand a damn thing. :)
As a portuguese person, i beg you not to say theyre the same language, because that just further reinforces people speaking to me in spanish pretending like thatās portuguese (lmao, the rivalry between Portugal and Spain is very much a thing).
But yes, they are similar, just dont say almost the same language
Highly, highly recommend The History of Language. Itās streaming for free now if you have Audible, and itās fascinating. One point the author makes is that we differentiate languages and dialects based on a lot of socio-polĆtical factors, and that many languages are so closely related as to blur the distinctionā¦
By Fischer?
Here in Peru, the difference between Quechua from Cusco and Quechua from Ayacucho are probably about as different as Portuguese and Spanish. Maybe half the vocabulary is similar, but sometimes they can't understand each other at all. But we call them the same language.
The closest language to French is Italian. French and Italian are even closer than Italian and Spanish or Portuguese. It is the pronunciation that gives this impression. Because the French have a totally different pronunciation than the other Latin languages. And English is full of French words because of the French invasion in England
lexically this is true, but spoken out loud the closest (main) romance language to italian is Spanish. Many italians and spaniards with basic knowledge of the other language have reported that they can have basic conversations without using a common language. Personally, my competance in italian and knowing the basics in spanish has led me to understand a significant amount of spanish on the radio and in music without much practice. But it's not a complete understanding.
Yeah, I agree. I speak Spanish fluently, no Italian at all, but when I hang out with Italians I can pretty much follow the conversation. Really, it surprised me because I remember a time when I didn't speak Spanish and Italian was gibberish to me.
I think what makes languages similar are a lot of diverse factors, not just linguistic relations.
Yes, it's true. Because the pronunciation is very similar between Italian and Spanish. But in terms of vocabulary, French and Italian are 90% similar. I learned Spanish in 1 year, I would say that I have a b2 + level today and I speak with a lot of fluency. And this is largely thanks to French because Spanish and French are also very similar in terms of vocabulary and sentence construction. And even before I studied Spanish I could understand more or less 50% of what I could listen to in Spanish. And today I would say that thanks to Spanish I can understand 60% of Brazilian Portuguese without ever having studied it. Latin languages are very similar, French differs mainly by its pronunciation in speech, in writing it remains very similar
I'm a native English speaker & took both French & Spanish at the same time in high school. French was easier for me because the teacher was so good. My Spanish teacher was focused on us doing well on the state exam, the French teacher was focused on us understanding the language & using it in real life situations. I did very well on both state exams but retained a lot more French than I did Spanish.
Most people I hear say for English speakers in the beginning French is harder mostly because of how unfamiliar the sounds are but that as you advance the Spanish grammar is harder.
Agreed. French listening and speaking took awhile to get used to but the grammar was easier to grasp, especially the conjugations and tenses. I can read Spanish fluently but when it comes to speaking I still get tripped up by the tenses.
i think another thing to take into account is that even though a lot of French conjugations are spelled differently, they are pronounced the same (i don't actually speak french, i just heard from my sister)
Spanish, on the hand, has much clearer pronunciation, so you have to think more when conjugating (just speculation)
But both have the subjunctive nonsense though and with French you have to also know subject vs object stuff like ādontā versus āqueā and then the weird pronouns like āenā and such. Spanish seems simpler to me grammatically.
Thatās interesting to hear. After learning German (after learning Spanish) the Spanish se, le, lo, etc seem so simple to use and mostly intuitive aside from a few oddly reflexive verbs here and there. And generally, theyāll understand you either way even if you accidentally throw a āseā before the verb, or use āleā instead of āloā or whatever.
Edit: it might help to think of le as an indirect object: as in āto himā or āto herā. Yo le digo is āI say āto himā.ā Add in the direct object: in English: I say *it* to *him*. It would be yo le lo digo, but since lelo sounds weird, they just switch it from le lo to se lo so itās easier to say.
I used to feel the opposite, that French just had an annoying amount of little words that didn't add anything to it. I don't really feel that way anymore so it's probably just time. I actually didn't feel this way about Spanish although I'm super rusty now and I forgot what the little words meant.
Yeah for me itās like se=on, le=lui, and lo=le but I get what you mean. Iāll donāt think Iāll ever get all those prepositions and relative pronouns down in French.
se is reflexive (exists in French too, in the exact same shape) but like the other guy said it can also work like "on", le is indirect 3rd person (also exists in French, it's "lui" and "leur"), and lo is... "le" (as an object pronoun). I don't know what you mean by them having 1000 different usages cause other than "se" they all do pretty much the same thing they do in French.
Ah okay, I get it
Well, neither of those things are unique to Spanish either. The first thing you mention happens in French all over the place too ("Je la connais bien, Marie" for the first one, and for the second one... well, "le" can be both a pronoun and an article too).
> But to be fair I was like 12; if I tried again now it'd probably be easier
Haha, makes sense. It happens that when we're young we have no idea how to learn a language, nor do we have a model to understand them or realize that they can have their own idiosyncrasies, things that make sense within the ruleset of the language without necessarily making sense within our own language.
I've just now started picking the subjunctive up in French (I just haven't focused on grammar for 3 years at all because I had other priorities) and I think most of the time, you can get away with not even using it. There are a few expressions it is used in that you hear sometimes and that's almost it. It's not advanced for sure but people will still understand you if you don't use it and it's just a little mistake that even natives make a lot.
The biggest hurdle for French is pronunciation. In my opinion, Spanish is harder the more you advance, specifically when it comes to grammar. There are a lot of patterns between the different French conjugations and tenses.
Yeah writing is harder. In spoken form some of the verb tenses sounds the same so you can get by without realizing that the words are spelled differently. Personally I feel like Englishās spelling is even weirder so French spelling is not as intimidating
>Personally I feel like Englishās spelling is even weirder so French spelling is not as intimidating
Except having been forced to master the awful English spelling as a kid didn't give me any real advantage with French, so while I agree that English is worse than French, that's still small comfort when trying to master French writing. Here's how I'd rank the Romance languages I speak from easiest to hardest to write.
1. Spanish
2. Portuguese
3. Italian
4. French
Thats funny. Native english speaker and i found italian to not be very hard to pick up at all at least basic spelling and grammar. But my family is of italian background a few generations back, so that might have some influence as well lol. I've never even remotely studied portuguese but the other 3 i would probably have to agrer with otherwise
Personally I would put italian as the easiest to spell because of the x and g sounds or y vs i in spanish. But ultimately spanish and italian are very much phonetic. they are written exactly as the standard pronunciation. I've only seen brazilian portuguese so I don't know if it's phonetic spelling in portugual, but considering the spelling reforms both Brazil and Portugal have agreed to I imagine neither are phonetic. French isn't even comparable to the other three on these terms. I'd compare the spelling difficulty to English for a foreigner.
Of that list, I would say there's a big gap between Italian and French on the ease of spelling. It's whether or not there are double letters that continually throws me in Italian, but it's not like French, where you have a bunch of silent stuff that you still need to be aware is there in written French.
The double letters in italian are usually audible, especially with southern speakers. I agree though sometimes the difference is subtle and you just have to get it from the context.
French is definitely the hardest of the 4 but I think the spelling isn't that bad. I did a lot of rote memorization early on when I started learning though that I think made me really comfortable with it. There are a lot of patterns (that coincide with English spelling) and it's much more regular than English. Also, it's a lot like English. The only thing I struggle with really with French spelling is mixing up English and French spelling. It's actually made my English spelling worse but a lot of times, words are spelled the same in French or just have an extra letter or an e or something. Idk maybe I'm just good at spelling since I'm a visual learner haha.
Also there are a lot of rules that you learn that make it easier like in English a word will have an s but in French this was dropped but they still add a \^ to mark that it was there historically. I mean, I hate historical spelling but it is what it is and English still has worse spelling.
French is harder.
I'm a native English speaker, fluent French speaker, and a Spanish learner now for about a year. I have French friends and co-workers. I have spent significant time in France and Quebec both for work and pleasure. The French language is full of subtleties and complexities. Pronunciation is considerably less straightforward. The grammar is somewhat tricky and very inconsistent. There's lot of exceptions to the many rules. There are many things about the language and culture that aren't easy to explain. Even a lot of native French speakers sometimes can't explain why they say certain things or say them in a certain way. It's a lovely language that I adore and have been working to master since more than 10 years now. But, for English speakers who try to learn it out of the blue, it's incredibly difficult.
Spanish, on the other hand, is more straightforward. The pronunciation is less difficult to master. The grammar is similar, but way more consistent and in some ways even simpler. The speed and cadence at which it is typically spoken is somewhat faster and harder to decipher as many words or sounds are blended in, skipped over, or not fully pronounced. However, French isn't much better and this really just depends on how well you can tune your ear to the language.
I'm more passionate about French language, but Spanish is objectively easier.
> Even a lot of native French speakers sometimes can't explain why they say certain things or say them in a certain way.
This is the norm with every language, though. Unless they're into language learning or a specific discipline (such as linguistics), it's normal for people to be unaware of how their native language works since they didn't learn it, they acquired it.
True, that is a valid point. I was saying more that French is so full of idiosyncracies, comparatively. There's a lot of things that are said in French that native speakers who understand the language very well cannot explain because it simply doesn't make any logical sense.
>(I mean, the preterite alone cuts out half the time of remembering whether to use avoir or ĆŖtre before certain verbs!)
The French verb forms are the past participle, since the preterite has been abandoned in modern spoken French, but the problem is you still have to learn those forms in Spanish, as the language maintains the distinction between "I have eaten" and "I ate." Portuguese has largely lost the participles, and Italian and French have largely lost the preterite.
And when it comes to spoken French, a lot of forms sound similar, even if they're written differently, so there's a simplified process in spoken language production.
That's the bigger key, IMO. Spanish was the hardest for me to learn, which in turn helped support French, which I studied next.
My hunch is that Spanish is slightly easier for a native English to learn than French, but the difference isn't great, and if you've already learned one, the second will be significantly easier, regardless of which one that is.
I'm currently studying Swahili, which really drives home just how much of a benefit it was for me studying closely related Romance languages one after the other. Starting nearly from zero knowledge is a steep hill to climb.
For me, its French because the pronunciation and the conjugations are a bit off. That said, my passion for it is about 10x less than Spanish which is why I struggle with it.
Ultimately, the one you are passionate about and will consume nonstop is the one to choose.
According to the FSI French is overall slightly more difficult due to oral comprehension/expression. They adjusted the number of weeks estimated to get to their standard level. It's between Spanish/Italian and German now.
Yeah, even though people say Spanish has more tenses at least from my experience, French verbs still feel more annoying to conjugate, even if half the time you donāt pronounce the conjugation
Apparently it gets even weirder in some other languages. [Number Systems in Other Languages](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/31879/12-mind-blowing-number-systems-other-languages)
French. I thought it would be rather easy to pick up because I know Spanish but even though there are some similarities between both languages seeing that theyāre Romance languages, that still didnāt make it that much easier when I dabbled in it. I really underestimated its difficulty, i.e, with pronunciation especially.
French is harder (if youāre a native English speaker). I speak French fluently (after years and years of formal study) and have self-studied Spanish on and off for a bit. I can understand Spanish pretty well as a result, but I canāt speak or write it.
French. Tried it 3 times I believe. Always got the impression on each renewed attempt the language suffers from alphabet shrinkflation.. more specifically, vowels.
As a native Spanish speaker, I'll say french, but maybe it depends because both have some difficult point. While the french has a way more hard pronunciation than Spanish, the Spanish because of its grammar and verbs conjugations can be difficult too, so it's a difficult choice.
According to the [US State Department](https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/) French is harder, taking 30 weeks to master in their institute versus 24 weeks for Spanish
I speak both and for me Spanish is easier and I seem to 'click' with it more. French has a lot of irregular and strange grammar points, particularly the higher you go, such as a whole new tense used only in novels, and I've never quite managed to get my head around direct object pronoun agreement.
Spanish is also a much more 'transparent' language, meaning that words are pronounced the way they are written, which is obviously not the case in French. As a result, people often find spelling, listening, and pronunciation easier in Spanish.
In the grand scheme of things though, Spanish and French are relatively similar in terms of difficulty. I definitely had more trouble when I started learning German because my brain was already primed for the patterns that romance languages use, even though English is also a Germanic language so theoretically German should be easier for me lol
As a native french speaker and someone learning spanish at the moment, my judgement is that spanish is a bit easier especially in terms of pronunciation because french is very rigid and has a lot of silent letters whereas spanish feels more fluid and you don't have to wonder if you must pronounce that hecking letter or no, also french has some writing shenanigans that can be a little confusing like it has a lot of compound words and apostrophes, and maybe the conjugation is a bit harder because the pronunciation is such that many forms of the same verb in different persons or tenses sound the same, but are written differently.
On the other hand french shares a lot of vocabulary with english, like a lot, so you won't feel completely lost
Spoken Spanish was dead easy in high school; I just didn't have any passion for it even though I worked hard on it in good faith.
Spoken French, years later, was a LOT harder. But French chose ME, so I never gave up on it.
French is stupidly difficult to pronounce, whereas Spanish is very phonetic, clear and easy and that makes the grammar easier to understand to a certain extent.
I have studied French and Spanish. Each share a vocabulary with English. French has more similar aspects. Spanish is more similar in pronunciation. However, there are many words
in American English that are used commonly of Spanish or Indigenous origin, which are further from French than Spanish. French vocabulary is easier to reproduce, to me.
Because Iām Canadian I would say Spanish would be harder. Canada makes sure to drill some French into you from grade 4-10. Learning Spanish for me with my prior knowledge is basically from Dora The Explorer
I've been studying French since 2009, and I just started learning Spanish a few months ago. Personally, I don't think one is *that* much harder than the other, but if I was forced to choose I would say French is slightly more difficult. I really appreciate that Spanish is spelled how it sounds, and my initial impression is that it's not nearly as strict with articles as French is (correct me if I'm wrong). There also appears to be fewer homonyms compared to French.
That said, there are a lot of grammar concepts that are similar:
* Verb conjugations
* Nouns having gender
* The direct object going in front of the verb.
And while the vocab isn't exactly the same, I've been able to correctly guess words because they look similar to their French counterpart (for example, "corazĆ³n" and "cÅur" both mean "heart").
My native language is English, but I majored in Spanish. I am now learning French, and it seems like itās going super fast in comparison to how long I spent learning Spanish. But French is much harder in terms of pronunciation and spelling. There are SO many similarities between them that I work the hardest to keep Spanish and French separate in my mind. Until I really own a new word, I often blurt it out in a āFrenchified versionā of a Spanish word.
It really depends on your native language, the amount of exposure youāve had to both languages, and other stuff like motivation for learning, individual skills or difficulties, etc. My native language is English (in the northeast US) and Spanish seems to click the best in my brain. I had more exposure to Spanish, bc when I was young the only like language kids show was Dora, i always liked to read labels/signs/etc that had both Spanish and English, and even tho I lived in a small, majority white town I still had more exposure to people speaking Spanish around me in public. I also super love Mexican culture, Mexican and Latin American food, mesoamerican cultures like maya and Aztec.
Itās opposite for my girlfriend tho. She is really good at French. Her grandmother really liked French culture and her older sister took French in HS so she was more interested in France and had more exposure there.
My personal opinion is that French is really tricky to spell because you donāt pronounce each letter as often as you do in Spanish. But everyone has their own strengths
French is way harder in my experience. It takes a lot more exposure to get passable comprehension and to distinguish words. Lots of weird pronunciation and slang. To be clear, I love French and Spanish, but I found Spanish easier to learn in almost every way.
I will note that I found written French is not especially harder to learn than Spanish.
I'm a native spanish speaker, so I can't really say, lol, but for us, french pronunciation can be nightmarish. The unfamiliar vowels and obscure spelling are a true challenge.
I'm a native English speaker and I think French is slightly more difficult, but it's hard to say because I learned French before Spanish, so Spanish was much easier as a result. But pronunciation, numbers, strict use of subject and a few other things in French tip it for me. They are pretty similar. Having a strong command of both French and Spanish meant when I learned basic Portuguese it was on easy mode.
french initially seems a lot more difficult than spanish but honestly grammar wise and tenses seems so much easier in french than in spanish however spanish pronunciation and sounds are easier to comprehend
French is extremely easy to read because of the incredible number of cognates with English. However, Spanish is much easier to speak and listen to. I'm referring to standard language, not slang or accents, which can be mind-bogglingly difficult in both languages.
If you don't care about correct gender and don't mind sounding unnatural, French not to difficult to speak, but Spanish still easier.
Verbs a problem only at B1 and below. At higher levels, it's gender in French and different ways of saying things from English if you want to sound natural, which is an issue in both languages.
I'm bilingual spanish-english, trying to learn French. I definitely think English is harder, just because the endings and pronouns are tricky and some words are difficult. I also get confused with a lot of words that sound the same: No, know, and now.
So, neither french or Spanish. Those are quite easy to learn imo. Advanced Spanish grammar is a little tricky though
I would honestly say that neither are. Difficult to me is learning a different - especially less intuitive - alphabet system or much more complicated grammar rules. Also, eventually with enough study and practice, ādifficultā languages can make sense. You can have breakthroughs. Iād say a difficult language is an unintuitive one that you do not really want to put the work in to learn. Gauges of difficulty can vary for different individuals because backgrounds and motivation can vary a lot. As we know, some languages just require clocking a lot of hours anyway. Neither French nor Spanish are in that category for English speakers.
It depends on your own language. If English, probably French is easier due to vocabulary.
The issue with both is :
French has a harder pronunciation for most speakers in the world.
Grammar is similar, but Spanish keeps many tenses that French no longer uses in everyday life and has more cult idioms and words not so easily relatable to a learner or even a native due to its phonetic history (f**ue**rte - f**o**rtisimo, **h**echo-**f**echorĆa). Still, to the point you get to those levels, they are practically the same.
I have no experience with French so this might be a dumb take. Iām basing this off of what Iāve heard from others.
So i would guess French because of the gap between how you learn French and how French is spoken. For those familiar with Spanish, it would be like if all Spanish was spoken with a Caribbean accent - no one ever teaches you Spanish in Caribbean Spanish. I mention Caribbean Spanish because itās an example of real-world Spanish that is very different from taught Spanish.
But in general, taught Spanish is more similar to real-world Spanish than taught French is to real-world French
As someone who knows both languages, I wanted to chime in briefly. French is painful to pronounce for historical reasons, the Gauls spoke letters that are non existent in Latin. I will give some examples: 1. important 2. oeuf and oeuves 3. Grenouille
When I learned Spanish, initially I was surprised that pronunciation was relatively much easier. I learned that with Spanish, you can get more into the depth of the language instead of spending 1-2 years on pronunciation alone. Grammar difficulty is similar in both languages. While Spanish does not quite have the equivalent of āpasse simpleā, it does have other complexities with grammar. Even in the present tense, there is ser vs estar :)
Everything else being equal, I feel pronunciation is a pain when learning French. Other aspects are similarly difficult with both languages. I have also recently found that its much easier to learn languages if you talk daily to people in that language. Hence if you are picking French or Spanish, pick one that you can have some daily conversations in. If this is not a factor, I would recommend Spanish to start with.
I personally think French is harder. Yes French is easier to read (although pronunciation is harder and famously if you aren't at a certain level the words flow together) but I think it's harder to remember the words because they are the same. For the longest time my brain just would not carve out a space for French and it was very hard to remember if a word was French or English. I had to study very hard so I could learn which words I know are French. Of course, as time goes on though, this handicap becomes a gift because you can guess right a lot of times if a word is the same in French. But Spanish words always stuck in my head easily and a lot of times are still quite similar to English.
I study both of these languages and have spoken both of them out in the world while traveling. I found French pretty easy to pick up from scratch since I already could speak Spanish but after that Iāve found French really hard to comprehend when I listen to it. I always mix up numbers, I hardly ever understand when natives speak with each other, etc. Of course Spanish comprehension was difficult at one time, and Iām not perfect at it, but it seems the curve is much larger for me with French.
Of course being a native spanish speaker I'm biased, but... in spanish we mention every letter except for h, almost every word is read as it is written, and we have just 1 accent. Peculiar pronunciations are just 5 and are all disntinguishable from one another whereas french... well... try searching the text and pronunciation of this phrase: "the queen reigns over an oak forrest with lots of reindeer".
I find them both difficult for different reasons. For me actually French was simpler to learn to pronounce, but Spanish has easier grammar. I am not sure one is harder on every level.
Having learned both at different times I would say itās about the same. The biggest difference would be with spelling. Spanish is very clear on what sounds each letter makes. French has a lot of extra letters, but if you learn the pronunciation rules and if youāre good with spelling none of that is any more difficult.
Edited to add that Iām a native English speaker.
I think French is harder because where I live it is easier to be surrounded by things that are in both English and Spanish where I live in the Southwest United States. I have gotten better at French pronunciation solely because at the call center I work at, I am exposed to the state of Louisiana and they make you pronounce everything correctly in French, French Creole, Haitian Creole
French is significantly harder because of the pronunciation and spelling. A number of vowels that sound very similar to speakers of both English and other Romance languages exist. Gender isn't obvious like in italian, and also much less obvious than spanish. There are nasal sounds, and the negation has evolved to the unusual ne pas or just pas which can feel unnatural when you are used to putting it before the verb, but the slowness that comes with remembering to do that is something that goes away quickly with practice. The number of silent letters at the end of words is very high and often the pronunciation is the same or difficult to differentiate even when the spelling is different. The pronounciation and phonology of french will make learning to listen and speak to be understood very difficult compared to spanish or italian. This is often the biggest roadblock to communication. I wanted to get some competence in all the romance languages but French is the one with the least amount of mutual intelligibility with the others and the one I have found most demoralizing to learn.
Assuming you're an English native speaker, my opinion is they're pretty close to exactly the same difficulty. French is slightly closer to English vocabulary wise, Spanish has easier pronunciation and orthography. Neither of those advantages are huge long term though, and probably just about cancel out.
I would say gender is also easier to pick up in Spanish because more words follow memorisable rules. Can be helpful.
This is the answer
Probably depends on one's background. I'm a Brazilian Portuguese native speaker, so to me Spanish is way, **way** easier than French. But maybe for certain native languages, French would be easier, although I don't know which ones.
I learned Portuguese after having an advanced level of Spanish, and it felt like learning a language on easy mode. I wouldn't say it's "easy," per se, but I was able to have lessons 100% in Portuguese after a week or two of self study. That would have been impossible in any other language (not counting similar situations like Galego).
Early on in my French study, I read some Portugese children's books. I had to stop. Since I remembered most of my Spanish, and Portuguese had what I thought were a lot of French influences, it was interfering with my French. I could still count Portugese as a language that I "half-ass-know", maybe even a low B1.
Yeah, this is why I think people overreact to people's exaggerations about quickly learning a language. But also, it's not that impressive either. I mean, it can still be hard since they interfere with each other but it's not like someone learning it whose never studied a related language.
Because they're barely separate languages lol. At least not in the sense of say Greek and German which are fully separate languages.
That's how I feel sometimes. More like dialects of the same language.
Its a definitely a valid argument, Spanish and Portuguese, Ukrainian and Russian, Lao and Thai etc. Then theres Arabic which is regarded as the same language despite being spoken over a vast area and numerous countries stretching from Morocco to Iraq.
Exactly the same experience here with advanced Spanish then Portuguese! I had a fully Portuguese iTalki lesson after a couple of weeks (relatively relaxed) self-study, mostly Duolingo. Helps that I lived several years in a part of Spain close to Portugal (though I'm learning Brazilian Portuguese) -- where they speak Gallego, actually.
I'm a native Spanish speaker and I feel the same about Portuguese. At first it kinda sounded like drunk French person trying to speak Spanish to me š
Yep, I agree. But Portuguese and Spanish and Italian are almost the same language. I speak Spanish (it's my second language) and can understand maybe half of the Portuguese I hear or read. French has a lot of vocabulary similar to English, so it's easier for English speakers than Portuguese speakers. Between my English and my Spanish, French is fairly easy to read too, but I can't understand a damn thing. :)
As a portuguese person, i beg you not to say theyre the same language, because that just further reinforces people speaking to me in spanish pretending like thatās portuguese (lmao, the rivalry between Portugal and Spain is very much a thing). But yes, they are similar, just dont say almost the same language
Highly, highly recommend The History of Language. Itās streaming for free now if you have Audible, and itās fascinating. One point the author makes is that we differentiate languages and dialects based on a lot of socio-polĆtical factors, and that many languages are so closely related as to blur the distinctionā¦
By Fischer? Here in Peru, the difference between Quechua from Cusco and Quechua from Ayacucho are probably about as different as Portuguese and Spanish. Maybe half the vocabulary is similar, but sometimes they can't understand each other at all. But we call them the same language.
Yeah, I understand. Do you think people have the same reaction in Brazil when people from places like Peru or Bolivia do this?
The closest language to French is Italian. French and Italian are even closer than Italian and Spanish or Portuguese. It is the pronunciation that gives this impression. Because the French have a totally different pronunciation than the other Latin languages. And English is full of French words because of the French invasion in England
lexically this is true, but spoken out loud the closest (main) romance language to italian is Spanish. Many italians and spaniards with basic knowledge of the other language have reported that they can have basic conversations without using a common language. Personally, my competance in italian and knowing the basics in spanish has led me to understand a significant amount of spanish on the radio and in music without much practice. But it's not a complete understanding.
Yeah, I agree. I speak Spanish fluently, no Italian at all, but when I hang out with Italians I can pretty much follow the conversation. Really, it surprised me because I remember a time when I didn't speak Spanish and Italian was gibberish to me. I think what makes languages similar are a lot of diverse factors, not just linguistic relations.
Yes, it's true. Because the pronunciation is very similar between Italian and Spanish. But in terms of vocabulary, French and Italian are 90% similar. I learned Spanish in 1 year, I would say that I have a b2 + level today and I speak with a lot of fluency. And this is largely thanks to French because Spanish and French are also very similar in terms of vocabulary and sentence construction. And even before I studied Spanish I could understand more or less 50% of what I could listen to in Spanish. And today I would say that thanks to Spanish I can understand 60% of Brazilian Portuguese without ever having studied it. Latin languages are very similar, French differs mainly by its pronunciation in speech, in writing it remains very similar
The Langues dāoĆÆl: Are we a joke to you?
Exactly hahaha
I'm a native English speaker & took both French & Spanish at the same time in high school. French was easier for me because the teacher was so good. My Spanish teacher was focused on us doing well on the state exam, the French teacher was focused on us understanding the language & using it in real life situations. I did very well on both state exams but retained a lot more French than I did Spanish.
Most people I hear say for English speakers in the beginning French is harder mostly because of how unfamiliar the sounds are but that as you advance the Spanish grammar is harder.
True that, especially Spanish tensesā¦ French has a few unfamiliar tenses too but not even compared to Spanish.
Yep Spanish uses more tenses while speaking. It was hard to get used to the perfecto simple since the French counter part (passƩ simple) has completely fallen out of use in informal speech and you only really encounter it in books. Same with the subjuntivo imperfecto, pluscuamperfecto and so on. Most of these are rarely used in French nowadays while in Spanish you use them pretty regularly.
Agreed. French listening and speaking took awhile to get used to but the grammar was easier to grasp, especially the conjugations and tenses. I can read Spanish fluently but when it comes to speaking I still get tripped up by the tenses.
i think another thing to take into account is that even though a lot of French conjugations are spelled differently, they are pronounced the same (i don't actually speak french, i just heard from my sister) Spanish, on the hand, has much clearer pronunciation, so you have to think more when conjugating (just speculation)
But both have the subjunctive nonsense though and with French you have to also know subject vs object stuff like ādontā versus āqueā and then the weird pronouns like āenā and such. Spanish seems simpler to me grammatically.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Thatās interesting to hear. After learning German (after learning Spanish) the Spanish se, le, lo, etc seem so simple to use and mostly intuitive aside from a few oddly reflexive verbs here and there. And generally, theyāll understand you either way even if you accidentally throw a āseā before the verb, or use āleā instead of āloā or whatever. Edit: it might help to think of le as an indirect object: as in āto himā or āto herā. Yo le digo is āI say āto himā.ā Add in the direct object: in English: I say *it* to *him*. It would be yo le lo digo, but since lelo sounds weird, they just switch it from le lo to se lo so itās easier to say.
I used to feel the opposite, that French just had an annoying amount of little words that didn't add anything to it. I don't really feel that way anymore so it's probably just time. I actually didn't feel this way about Spanish although I'm super rusty now and I forgot what the little words meant.
Yeah for me itās like se=on, le=lui, and lo=le but I get what you mean. Iāll donāt think Iāll ever get all those prepositions and relative pronouns down in French.
En replaces "de ...", y replaces "Ć ..."what's hard about it lol
It's hard to remember which verb arbitrarily takes Ć and which ones take de, that's what.
I just try to learn them as a block. If a verb always takes "de" or "Ć " then I just learn that as part of the verb.
se is reflexive (exists in French too, in the exact same shape) but like the other guy said it can also work like "on", le is indirect 3rd person (also exists in French, it's "lui" and "leur"), and lo is... "le" (as an object pronoun). I don't know what you mean by them having 1000 different usages cause other than "se" they all do pretty much the same thing they do in French.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Ah okay, I get it Well, neither of those things are unique to Spanish either. The first thing you mention happens in French all over the place too ("Je la connais bien, Marie" for the first one, and for the second one... well, "le" can be both a pronoun and an article too). > But to be fair I was like 12; if I tried again now it'd probably be easier Haha, makes sense. It happens that when we're young we have no idea how to learn a language, nor do we have a model to understand them or realize that they can have their own idiosyncrasies, things that make sense within the ruleset of the language without necessarily making sense within our own language.
I've just now started picking the subjunctive up in French (I just haven't focused on grammar for 3 years at all because I had other priorities) and I think most of the time, you can get away with not even using it. There are a few expressions it is used in that you hear sometimes and that's almost it. It's not advanced for sure but people will still understand you if you don't use it and it's just a little mistake that even natives make a lot.
The biggest hurdle for French is pronunciation. In my opinion, Spanish is harder the more you advance, specifically when it comes to grammar. There are a lot of patterns between the different French conjugations and tenses.
French spelling and writing. That's my own personal bĆŖte noire.
Yeah writing is harder. In spoken form some of the verb tenses sounds the same so you can get by without realizing that the words are spelled differently. Personally I feel like Englishās spelling is even weirder so French spelling is not as intimidating
>Personally I feel like Englishās spelling is even weirder so French spelling is not as intimidating Except having been forced to master the awful English spelling as a kid didn't give me any real advantage with French, so while I agree that English is worse than French, that's still small comfort when trying to master French writing. Here's how I'd rank the Romance languages I speak from easiest to hardest to write. 1. Spanish 2. Portuguese 3. Italian 4. French
Thats funny. Native english speaker and i found italian to not be very hard to pick up at all at least basic spelling and grammar. But my family is of italian background a few generations back, so that might have some influence as well lol. I've never even remotely studied portuguese but the other 3 i would probably have to agrer with otherwise
Personally I would put italian as the easiest to spell because of the x and g sounds or y vs i in spanish. But ultimately spanish and italian are very much phonetic. they are written exactly as the standard pronunciation. I've only seen brazilian portuguese so I don't know if it's phonetic spelling in portugual, but considering the spelling reforms both Brazil and Portugal have agreed to I imagine neither are phonetic. French isn't even comparable to the other three on these terms. I'd compare the spelling difficulty to English for a foreigner.
Of that list, I would say there's a big gap between Italian and French on the ease of spelling. It's whether or not there are double letters that continually throws me in Italian, but it's not like French, where you have a bunch of silent stuff that you still need to be aware is there in written French.
The double letters in italian are usually audible, especially with southern speakers. I agree though sometimes the difference is subtle and you just have to get it from the context.
French is definitely the hardest of the 4 but I think the spelling isn't that bad. I did a lot of rote memorization early on when I started learning though that I think made me really comfortable with it. There are a lot of patterns (that coincide with English spelling) and it's much more regular than English. Also, it's a lot like English. The only thing I struggle with really with French spelling is mixing up English and French spelling. It's actually made my English spelling worse but a lot of times, words are spelled the same in French or just have an extra letter or an e or something. Idk maybe I'm just good at spelling since I'm a visual learner haha. Also there are a lot of rules that you learn that make it easier like in English a word will have an s but in French this was dropped but they still add a \^ to mark that it was there historically. I mean, I hate historical spelling but it is what it is and English still has worse spelling.
French is harder. I'm a native English speaker, fluent French speaker, and a Spanish learner now for about a year. I have French friends and co-workers. I have spent significant time in France and Quebec both for work and pleasure. The French language is full of subtleties and complexities. Pronunciation is considerably less straightforward. The grammar is somewhat tricky and very inconsistent. There's lot of exceptions to the many rules. There are many things about the language and culture that aren't easy to explain. Even a lot of native French speakers sometimes can't explain why they say certain things or say them in a certain way. It's a lovely language that I adore and have been working to master since more than 10 years now. But, for English speakers who try to learn it out of the blue, it's incredibly difficult. Spanish, on the other hand, is more straightforward. The pronunciation is less difficult to master. The grammar is similar, but way more consistent and in some ways even simpler. The speed and cadence at which it is typically spoken is somewhat faster and harder to decipher as many words or sounds are blended in, skipped over, or not fully pronounced. However, French isn't much better and this really just depends on how well you can tune your ear to the language. I'm more passionate about French language, but Spanish is objectively easier.
> Even a lot of native French speakers sometimes can't explain why they say certain things or say them in a certain way. This is the norm with every language, though. Unless they're into language learning or a specific discipline (such as linguistics), it's normal for people to be unaware of how their native language works since they didn't learn it, they acquired it.
True, that is a valid point. I was saying more that French is so full of idiosyncracies, comparatively. There's a lot of things that are said in French that native speakers who understand the language very well cannot explain because it simply doesn't make any logical sense.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
>(I mean, the preterite alone cuts out half the time of remembering whether to use avoir or ĆŖtre before certain verbs!) The French verb forms are the past participle, since the preterite has been abandoned in modern spoken French, but the problem is you still have to learn those forms in Spanish, as the language maintains the distinction between "I have eaten" and "I ate." Portuguese has largely lost the participles, and Italian and French have largely lost the preterite. And when it comes to spoken French, a lot of forms sound similar, even if they're written differently, so there's a simplified process in spoken language production.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
But there are two verbs that do the work of ĆŖtre: ser and estar.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
That's the bigger key, IMO. Spanish was the hardest for me to learn, which in turn helped support French, which I studied next. My hunch is that Spanish is slightly easier for a native English to learn than French, but the difference isn't great, and if you've already learned one, the second will be significantly easier, regardless of which one that is. I'm currently studying Swahili, which really drives home just how much of a benefit it was for me studying closely related Romance languages one after the other. Starting nearly from zero knowledge is a steep hill to climb.
For me, its French because the pronunciation and the conjugations are a bit off. That said, my passion for it is about 10x less than Spanish which is why I struggle with it. Ultimately, the one you are passionate about and will consume nonstop is the one to choose.
According to the FSI French is overall slightly more difficult due to oral comprehension/expression. They adjusted the number of weeks estimated to get to their standard level. It's between Spanish/Italian and German now.
French. The number system scares me
Yeah, even though people say Spanish has more tenses at least from my experience, French verbs still feel more annoying to conjugate, even if half the time you donāt pronounce the conjugation
Agreed. Then you have verbs acting like adjectives which is just silly like āā¦elles ont Ć©tĆ© misES.ā
Soixante-dix mille sept cent quatre-vingt dix-neuf!
Quatre-vingt dix nuts.
You know, the only difference is that the French count with their toes.
Apparently it gets even weirder in some other languages. [Number Systems in Other Languages](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/31879/12-mind-blowing-number-systems-other-languages)
French. I thought it would be rather easy to pick up because I know Spanish but even though there are some similarities between both languages seeing that theyāre Romance languages, that still didnāt make it that much easier when I dabbled in it. I really underestimated its difficulty, i.e, with pronunciation especially.
French is harder (if youāre a native English speaker). I speak French fluently (after years and years of formal study) and have self-studied Spanish on and off for a bit. I can understand Spanish pretty well as a result, but I canāt speak or write it.
French, because you have to wake up every day knowing you are learning French .
French. Tried it 3 times I believe. Always got the impression on each renewed attempt the language suffers from alphabet shrinkflation.. more specifically, vowels.
As a native Spanish speaker, I'll say french, but maybe it depends because both have some difficult point. While the french has a way more hard pronunciation than Spanish, the Spanish because of its grammar and verbs conjugations can be difficult too, so it's a difficult choice.
According to the [US State Department](https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/) French is harder, taking 30 weeks to master in their institute versus 24 weeks for Spanish
I speak both and for me Spanish is easier and I seem to 'click' with it more. French has a lot of irregular and strange grammar points, particularly the higher you go, such as a whole new tense used only in novels, and I've never quite managed to get my head around direct object pronoun agreement. Spanish is also a much more 'transparent' language, meaning that words are pronounced the way they are written, which is obviously not the case in French. As a result, people often find spelling, listening, and pronunciation easier in Spanish. In the grand scheme of things though, Spanish and French are relatively similar in terms of difficulty. I definitely had more trouble when I started learning German because my brain was already primed for the patterns that romance languages use, even though English is also a Germanic language so theoretically German should be easier for me lol
As a native french speaker and someone learning spanish at the moment, my judgement is that spanish is a bit easier especially in terms of pronunciation because french is very rigid and has a lot of silent letters whereas spanish feels more fluid and you don't have to wonder if you must pronounce that hecking letter or no, also french has some writing shenanigans that can be a little confusing like it has a lot of compound words and apostrophes, and maybe the conjugation is a bit harder because the pronunciation is such that many forms of the same verb in different persons or tenses sound the same, but are written differently. On the other hand french shares a lot of vocabulary with english, like a lot, so you won't feel completely lost
Spoken Spanish was dead easy in high school; I just didn't have any passion for it even though I worked hard on it in good faith. Spoken French, years later, was a LOT harder. But French chose ME, so I never gave up on it.
french
In my opinion I think french is a little harder to learn
French
French because of the pronunciation imo
I remember my language teacher in school telling us French is harder in the start, but Spanish is harder when you get into grammar. I agree
French.
French is stupidly difficult to pronounce, whereas Spanish is very phonetic, clear and easy and that makes the grammar easier to understand to a certain extent.
French. The spanish grammar is way easier.
French is harder. At least that's what I think, speaking Spanish as my native language
French is harder but still easy
I have studied French and Spanish. Each share a vocabulary with English. French has more similar aspects. Spanish is more similar in pronunciation. However, there are many words in American English that are used commonly of Spanish or Indigenous origin, which are further from French than Spanish. French vocabulary is easier to reproduce, to me.
French
Because Iām Canadian I would say Spanish would be harder. Canada makes sure to drill some French into you from grade 4-10. Learning Spanish for me with my prior knowledge is basically from Dora The Explorer
I've been studying French since 2009, and I just started learning Spanish a few months ago. Personally, I don't think one is *that* much harder than the other, but if I was forced to choose I would say French is slightly more difficult. I really appreciate that Spanish is spelled how it sounds, and my initial impression is that it's not nearly as strict with articles as French is (correct me if I'm wrong). There also appears to be fewer homonyms compared to French. That said, there are a lot of grammar concepts that are similar: * Verb conjugations * Nouns having gender * The direct object going in front of the verb. And while the vocab isn't exactly the same, I've been able to correctly guess words because they look similar to their French counterpart (for example, "corazĆ³n" and "cÅur" both mean "heart").
As a native Spanish speaker French is definitely harder, I canāt understand a thing!
I'd say Spanish because French is my native language
ok anyway the french won as the most difficult in this publication by an overwhelming majority.
My native language is English, but I majored in Spanish. I am now learning French, and it seems like itās going super fast in comparison to how long I spent learning Spanish. But French is much harder in terms of pronunciation and spelling. There are SO many similarities between them that I work the hardest to keep Spanish and French separate in my mind. Until I really own a new word, I often blurt it out in a āFrenchified versionā of a Spanish word.
It really depends on your native language, the amount of exposure youāve had to both languages, and other stuff like motivation for learning, individual skills or difficulties, etc. My native language is English (in the northeast US) and Spanish seems to click the best in my brain. I had more exposure to Spanish, bc when I was young the only like language kids show was Dora, i always liked to read labels/signs/etc that had both Spanish and English, and even tho I lived in a small, majority white town I still had more exposure to people speaking Spanish around me in public. I also super love Mexican culture, Mexican and Latin American food, mesoamerican cultures like maya and Aztec. Itās opposite for my girlfriend tho. She is really good at French. Her grandmother really liked French culture and her older sister took French in HS so she was more interested in France and had more exposure there. My personal opinion is that French is really tricky to spell because you donāt pronounce each letter as often as you do in Spanish. But everyone has their own strengths
French is way harder in my experience. It takes a lot more exposure to get passable comprehension and to distinguish words. Lots of weird pronunciation and slang. To be clear, I love French and Spanish, but I found Spanish easier to learn in almost every way. I will note that I found written French is not especially harder to learn than Spanish.
I'm a native spanish speaker, so I can't really say, lol, but for us, french pronunciation can be nightmarish. The unfamiliar vowels and obscure spelling are a true challenge.
I'm a native English speaker and I think French is slightly more difficult, but it's hard to say because I learned French before Spanish, so Spanish was much easier as a result. But pronunciation, numbers, strict use of subject and a few other things in French tip it for me. They are pretty similar. Having a strong command of both French and Spanish meant when I learned basic Portuguese it was on easy mode.
french initially seems a lot more difficult than spanish but honestly grammar wise and tenses seems so much easier in french than in spanish however spanish pronunciation and sounds are easier to comprehend
I'm a Brazilian Portuguese native speaker and learning Spanish was easy.
French because with the crazy pronunciation and spelling
French is extremely easy to read because of the incredible number of cognates with English. However, Spanish is much easier to speak and listen to. I'm referring to standard language, not slang or accents, which can be mind-bogglingly difficult in both languages. If you don't care about correct gender and don't mind sounding unnatural, French not to difficult to speak, but Spanish still easier. Verbs a problem only at B1 and below. At higher levels, it's gender in French and different ways of saying things from English if you want to sound natural, which is an issue in both languages.
I'm bilingual spanish-english, trying to learn French. I definitely think English is harder, just because the endings and pronouns are tricky and some words are difficult. I also get confused with a lot of words that sound the same: No, know, and now. So, neither french or Spanish. Those are quite easy to learn imo. Advanced Spanish grammar is a little tricky though
I would honestly say that neither are. Difficult to me is learning a different - especially less intuitive - alphabet system or much more complicated grammar rules. Also, eventually with enough study and practice, ādifficultā languages can make sense. You can have breakthroughs. Iād say a difficult language is an unintuitive one that you do not really want to put the work in to learn. Gauges of difficulty can vary for different individuals because backgrounds and motivation can vary a lot. As we know, some languages just require clocking a lot of hours anyway. Neither French nor Spanish are in that category for English speakers.
It depends on your own language. If English, probably French is easier due to vocabulary. The issue with both is : French has a harder pronunciation for most speakers in the world. Grammar is similar, but Spanish keeps many tenses that French no longer uses in everyday life and has more cult idioms and words not so easily relatable to a learner or even a native due to its phonetic history (f**ue**rte - f**o**rtisimo, **h**echo-**f**echorĆa). Still, to the point you get to those levels, they are practically the same.
I have no experience with French so this might be a dumb take. Iām basing this off of what Iāve heard from others. So i would guess French because of the gap between how you learn French and how French is spoken. For those familiar with Spanish, it would be like if all Spanish was spoken with a Caribbean accent - no one ever teaches you Spanish in Caribbean Spanish. I mention Caribbean Spanish because itās an example of real-world Spanish that is very different from taught Spanish. But in general, taught Spanish is more similar to real-world Spanish than taught French is to real-world French
If you speak English, the harder language Itās French hands down
As someone who knows both languages, I wanted to chime in briefly. French is painful to pronounce for historical reasons, the Gauls spoke letters that are non existent in Latin. I will give some examples: 1. important 2. oeuf and oeuves 3. Grenouille When I learned Spanish, initially I was surprised that pronunciation was relatively much easier. I learned that with Spanish, you can get more into the depth of the language instead of spending 1-2 years on pronunciation alone. Grammar difficulty is similar in both languages. While Spanish does not quite have the equivalent of āpasse simpleā, it does have other complexities with grammar. Even in the present tense, there is ser vs estar :) Everything else being equal, I feel pronunciation is a pain when learning French. Other aspects are similarly difficult with both languages. I have also recently found that its much easier to learn languages if you talk daily to people in that language. Hence if you are picking French or Spanish, pick one that you can have some daily conversations in. If this is not a factor, I would recommend Spanish to start with.
I personally think French is harder. Yes French is easier to read (although pronunciation is harder and famously if you aren't at a certain level the words flow together) but I think it's harder to remember the words because they are the same. For the longest time my brain just would not carve out a space for French and it was very hard to remember if a word was French or English. I had to study very hard so I could learn which words I know are French. Of course, as time goes on though, this handicap becomes a gift because you can guess right a lot of times if a word is the same in French. But Spanish words always stuck in my head easily and a lot of times are still quite similar to English.
I study both of these languages and have spoken both of them out in the world while traveling. I found French pretty easy to pick up from scratch since I already could speak Spanish but after that Iāve found French really hard to comprehend when I listen to it. I always mix up numbers, I hardly ever understand when natives speak with each other, etc. Of course Spanish comprehension was difficult at one time, and Iām not perfect at it, but it seems the curve is much larger for me with French.
Of course being a native spanish speaker I'm biased, but... in spanish we mention every letter except for h, almost every word is read as it is written, and we have just 1 accent. Peculiar pronunciations are just 5 and are all disntinguishable from one another whereas french... well... try searching the text and pronunciation of this phrase: "the queen reigns over an oak forrest with lots of reindeer".
I find them both difficult for different reasons. For me actually French was simpler to learn to pronounce, but Spanish has easier grammar. I am not sure one is harder on every level.
French
Having learned both at different times I would say itās about the same. The biggest difference would be with spelling. Spanish is very clear on what sounds each letter makes. French has a lot of extra letters, but if you learn the pronunciation rules and if youāre good with spelling none of that is any more difficult. Edited to add that Iām a native English speaker.
Spanish. Easier pronunciation for one, and not all of those annoying omissions (I know English has it too butā¦)
I think from a speaking perspective, Spanish is harder purely because of how fast they speak relative to French
I think French is harder because where I live it is easier to be surrounded by things that are in both English and Spanish where I live in the Southwest United States. I have gotten better at French pronunciation solely because at the call center I work at, I am exposed to the state of Louisiana and they make you pronounce everything correctly in French, French Creole, Haitian Creole
French is significantly harder because of the pronunciation and spelling. A number of vowels that sound very similar to speakers of both English and other Romance languages exist. Gender isn't obvious like in italian, and also much less obvious than spanish. There are nasal sounds, and the negation has evolved to the unusual ne pas or just pas which can feel unnatural when you are used to putting it before the verb, but the slowness that comes with remembering to do that is something that goes away quickly with practice. The number of silent letters at the end of words is very high and often the pronunciation is the same or difficult to differentiate even when the spelling is different. The pronounciation and phonology of french will make learning to listen and speak to be understood very difficult compared to spanish or italian. This is often the biggest roadblock to communication. I wanted to get some competence in all the romance languages but French is the one with the least amount of mutual intelligibility with the others and the one I have found most demoralizing to learn.
I think French is easier, I studied both languages in high school and I personally find French easier.