My main concern with French is that not every high school teaches it. If it’s likely that your family might move during his high school years, he might have to switch to another language at his new school. He wouldn’t be penalized for this in college admissions (even colleges that require three or four years of foreign language would make an exception for the student who moves and can’t continue to study the language he started with), but he would miss out on the experience of studying the language at a beyond-beginner level.
Spanish is taught everywhere.
It is also possible that your school system might drop French from the curriculum if the budget is cut or the teacher retires. This happened with German when my son was in high school. Some of his friends who had taken German 1 and 2 were unable to continue to German 3.
Three points that no one in this thread has mentioned. One of them would be my #1 criterion.
Which language has better teachers in his school? He would get more out of taking Basque with a great teacher than out of taking a more economically useful language with a mediocre teacher. Especially for a first foreign language to learn! Once you learn how to learn a foreign language, the next one, and the one after that are much easier. Also, which language has the better students?
French is actually somewhat more difficult for English-speakers to learn than Spanish. Phonetically, Spanish has fewer sounds than English, and really no sounds that English speakers do not use. French, on the other hand, has quite a number of sounds that English speakers do not use.
What’s more, there really is a right way and a wrong way to pronounce French, and traditionally French teachers are sticklers about correct pronunciation. That’s not a big problem at all for a kid with a good ear for sounds, but a kid who doesn’t have that ability may struggle some.
It’s harder to be a stickler with Spanish, because “standard” Spanish is spoken only by a relatively small fraction of world Spanish-speakers. It’s not like what we call Chinese, which is really a group of distantly related languages whose speakers often can’t understand one another. Spanish speakers the world over use slightly different vocabulary and pronunciation, but they have no real trouble understanding one another. For the most part, however, they don’t have the French fetish of pronouncing every word just so.
Learning a language is also learning the cultures and literatures of the people who speak it. It's a jump ball for me between French and Spanish on this criterion -- they both have a really interesting range of cultures. Someone may be drawn more to one than the other, however. And not in obvious ways. French is a really important language in Africa, for example, and Spanish isn't.
It might be a good idea to look closely at the curriculum, though, and see if one of the languages gets you more quickly to doing something more interesting than talking like a dull six-year-old and memorizing grammar.
Spanish is spelled phonetically except for words borrowed from other languages. Once you learn the rules, you never have to worry about how to spell a Spanish word.
When I was about to enter junior high, our family moved, and the counselor at the new school said that French 1 was full. I could choose Spanish 1 or wait until 9th grade to take a foreign language. I chose Spanish and quickly found that it had huge advantages. My friends who were taking French spent hours every week studying the spelling of their vocabulary words. I picked up the Spanish phonetic rules quickly and never spent a moment worrying about spelling.
In some parts of the country, there are a lot of kids who are not fluent in Spanish but who have some knowledge of the language because relatives speak it. These kids (often called heritage speakers) tend to end up in the regular Spanish classes (unlike the fluent Spanish speakers, who usually take a different language), and their presence may make things difficult for the other kids, especially if the teachers grade on a curve. This is less likely to happen for French in most parts of the United States.
My son dropped Spanish after level 3 for this reason. In his school, Spanish classes at levels 3 and up were dominated by heritage speakers. He barely squeaked through Spanish 3 and knew that it would be a disaster for him to attempt Spanish 4. This would not have happened if he had taken French.
From an academic point of view it makes no difference. Colleges will be happy to see either on a transcript. I think Spanish is a bit easier for English speakers to speak with a good accent, but that’s not really important. As romance languages if you learn French first Spanish will be relatively easy and vice versa.
As others have said, French has a robust literary and film tradition and is spoken in parts of Africa, the Caribbean and Canada. On the other hand there is no question that here in the US you will encounter many, many more Spanish speakers. As an architect I do a lot of work with our Hispanic immigrant community and I regularly wish I’d studied Spanish not French in school.
I studied German in college and amusingly while almost no one in the world speaks it, it came in very handy when DH did a post-doctoral fellowship in Germany and I was able to get my German up to a level where I could work there within a couple of months of arrival.
One thing you might try to find out is if there is any danger French won’t be offered all four years of high school and if the teachers in one language or the other are better. I think one of the reasons Latin was relatively popular in our high school is that the Latin teacher was fabulous (she was working on her PhD dissertation.)
I think the above posters have already given you great advice However, I just wanted to add our experience in case it helps you.
Our S liked French from an early age, and took French all 3 years of middle school and 2 years in high school. He moved to a different school after 10th grade and was stuck.
The new school in the same area of the state, didn’t offer any higher French classes than those he had completed at his old school. His choices were to retake French IV, take Spanish I, Chinese or Latin. None of those choices appealed to him and hence he has taken no second language these last 2 years. I’m quite sure that that wasn’t the best option but he isn’t a kid who can be dissuaded easily from his chosen course.
We found out, after the fact, that many schools here don’t offer French or don’t have French IV, V or AP. This is primarily due to the lack of French teachers who are qualified to teach those classes at most schools. Some schools(not my son’s school) in our district are pooling their resources and holding common classes for those students who really want to learn French. It’s hardly an ideal situation.
Since you are planning ahead, my advice to you would be research all the possibilities at your son’s future school, vet the quality of the teachers by talking to other kids and parents who have gone through it and be prepared for any surprises. Good Luck to your son. French is a beautiful language(I took it in high school) and well worth learning.
He read this thread and decided to go with Spanish. My D took French and though she loves French, she says disadvantages mentioned in this thread are applicable to their school. There is only one teacher which makes scheduling extremely complicated, there is only one AP so there is a GPA hit if you take French V and learning opportunities in community are very limited.
She is more of a literature and performing arts person so French has more value for her but as her brother is a STEM oriented student focused on GPA and high rank, French offers no advantage for him. He feels good about his decision so I’m happy too. I appreciate each post and each input. Thank you.
My kids mentioned that I’m officially a CC addict and they refused to get their own accounts.
There is the possibility that if he goes on to do PhD study in math, French will be more useful. But that is a very small possibility that is not really predictable at this point.
@SugarlessCandy Is there a way he can briefly meet the HS teachers? My DD has taken both Spanish and French and prefers Spanish for several of the reasons mentioned above, plus she doesn’t like her French teacher. At her school, both German and Mandarin are very popular because the teachers are apparently fun. In your son’s school, there may be a preference for either the Spanish or French teacher.
I see you said there are more scheduling issues when you take French at your school. I just want to add for others who may be reading this thread, that turned out to be a huge disadvantage of Latin in our school. My kids had less than optimal course choices almost every year because of Latin.
I’m 100% Irish and I don’t speak Irish (or Gaelic).
I have one daughter who took French, one who took Spanish. Neither can do more than order in a restaurant, but they did learn the structure of language.
OP’s son has made his decision, but I’d like to respond to something I’ve found to be a “myth”, that of Spanish’s supposed ease. I don’t think that Spanish is easier than French, in fact through surprised experience I’d say the opposite. Pronunciation and spelling are only one tiny fraction of learning a language. In my experience, the two biggies are vocabulary and grammar. For vocabulary, they’re close, but there are more similar words in French and English if not outright the exact same ones. And for grammar, French and Spanish have similarities, but French has dropped a bunch of conjugations (passé simple, various subjunctives) that are still used in Spanish. As a consequence, conjugating anything is much harder in Spanish. I’d say the first two years are easier in Spanish, but levels 3-AP are harder in Spanish. Because so many students stop at Level 2, that may explain why the “myth” was born, but making sense at the paragraph length is much harder in Spanish because tenses add much complication to coordinating complex sentences and sentence to sentence.
The easiest language for an English speaker is probably Italian. The grammar has fewer irregularities than Spanish or French, no cases unlike Latin or German, no new alphabet to learn, has regular spelling, and has some overlap in vocabulary with English.
Rule of thumb, when in doubt, always take the subject that has the best teachers.
I was the poster who first put forward the “Spanish is easier” idea, although I qualified it a lot (for some students, not that big a deal . . . I never said it was “much” harder ). I had 5s on both the Spanish Literature and French Literature APs in high school, and I am at least reading-fluent in both. I can also get by in Italian and Catalan, and I can read Portuguese. I never, ever really got the hang of French pronunciation – I sound like a complete clod when I speak French.
I don’t know what is taught in French classes these days. The passe simple is gone from most French conversation, but it’s still there in a lot of literature. It would be an awfully sad thing if kids could take five years of French and be unable to read a 19th Century French novel.
And, yes, there are slightly more French cognates in English than Spanish ones, because, duh, England was ruled by a French nobility for a few centuries. But looking at cognates is a horrible way to learn vocabulary, since the cognates often develop different meanings in the two languages – sometimes subtle differences, and sometimes major ones. Cognates are a serious trap for beginning language students.
I’ve taken French a little bit of Spanish (self taught one summer) and Italian (while I was in Germany). I agree that Italian is the easiest of the three, but I didn’t think Spanish grammar was harder than French. I certainly had to learn the passe simple in French - you can’t read a novel without it. And I don’t know if Spanish has extra subjunctive tenses, but there was certainly plenty of subjunctive in French class. Weirdly German also has something they call the subjunctive, but in my opinion was really the conditional tense.
Wrt languages : Well, there are three subjunctives in Spanish, and only one that’s used in French. There used to be an imperfect subjunctive and it’s so rare you now find it in game shows like Jeopardy as a trick question (not ‘the’ Jeopardy but equivalent game shows on French TV).
It may be just me with all the conjugations - there’s learning them, but also using them properly. memorizing words seems much easier to me.
Beginners are taught to heavily use cognates. Of course I’d assume they’re not given the ‘fake’ ones like fastidious /fastidieux (which means boring) but rather the useful ones like activites, adorer, musique, animal…
I agree that French teachers have a reputation for being stricter/sticklers for spelling/expect more. Not sure if it’s true or just a reputation that floats around.
Passe simple is no longer used in contemporary French, and it’s not taught in elementary school, except perhaps in 5-6th grade for oral recognition, although I’d guess most French kids 'understand it’s when they hear it because it’s used in fairy tales. I know some kids books from the 20th century were rewritten because kids couldn’t read them due to passe simple making no sense to them - just like when 'f’stopped being ‘s’ or LxIv stopped being immediately readable. There was some controversy when its teaching was pushed from 6th to 8th grade in French middle schools (for native speakers) so that they could read older novels.
You can read the description, but nowadays it’s all about cultural comparison, interpretative communication, interpersonal communication…
More to the point AP French (Language and culture) doesn’t teach novels. It includes short literary excerpts so at AP level I suppose students ought to be able to recognize/identify it. It’d typically include lots of articles, films, podcasts, art, graphs /maps, etc. It’s built on standards* that have been approved since the 90’s for college and updated recently for secondary schools, and around big concepts like 'communities ', 'science and technology ', global issues ', ‘education and family’… It’s the same for AP Spanish BTW.
(I look into all new AP 's when they roll out. This one corresponded with the demise of ap French lit, which was based on a class majors would take junior year. Only Spanish kept its Spanish Literature class and exam.)
AP language is tested at the intermediate mid to high level, low advanced at the highest.
The Spanish literature AP has more than 30 titles, unabridged, including text as difficult as Lazarillo de Tormes or JM Heredia’s. It’s considerably harder and in another category of difficult. Kind of like AP physics1 vs physics C : E/M.
when you read language teaching literature , 'the standards ' and 'the 5C's" are everywhere.
Good on you, Sugarless . I hope he enjoys whatever he ends up picking!
I took Spanish. Took it all through high school and part of college.
As a PhD student in history, I’ve decided to go into a field that requires reading knowledge of French and German so that’s what I’m learning now.
No, being a historian doesn’t mean you have to know the classical language of that area UNLESS your studies are that far back. I don’t go beyond mid-19th century (going backwards) and they spoke pretty much the same English, French, and German then.
It’s a shame he’ll miss out on learning French, French culture and reading French literature in its language (assuming he takes 4 years). There is much more of note French literature than Spanish. Plus, knowing French enhances one’s understanding of many phrases that have crept into educated English. So glad I opted for French eons ago and then took college German (was a chemistry major). Knowing other languages helps one understand how languages are constructed (I was fortunate to never have grueling grammar deconstructions in school, learning names of so many parts of speech- learned using English well enough for placement in the top required lit class in preAP days). H learned 3 languages and alphabets growing up in India.
Wrong about Spanish as well as English being the languages of this country. There are many people whose other language is other than Spanish, and English is needed to communicate outside of one’s cultural group. English, not Spanish, is the common language taught around the world. The Spanish spoken by different ethnic groups varies- something I learned now that I live in Florida (eg Puerto Ricans living here who are highly educated have a home language spoken with rapidity and dropped words/parts of words that is hard for other Spanish speakers)
If he takes 4 years of the same foreign language he likely will be more competitive for college admissions (minimums and what most accepted students have are different). Plus, it could exempt him from needing to take a foreign language in college. This matters for U of Wisconsin and perhaps other places.
No need to have more than 4 years of a foreign language to learn grammar et al- a 5th year is more literature and culture. Some schools will require a placement test to continue the language in college. Getting retroactive college credits from HS classes is not always worth spending college time in it. It depends on one’s major.
In the case of even modern Chinese history, if you can’t read classical Chinese, you won’t be able to read official government documents or most literature before ~1920 and many others produced afterwards as they were all written in classical Chinese.
This would severely impair anyone attempting to conduct research on anything related to modern Chinese history…or understanding events/writings which influenced modern Chinese history into the present.
In short, if you don’t gain some proficiency in reading classical Chinese by a certain point in one’s PhD in this field in most elite/respectable programs(i.e. fail the translation exam more than a few times), said grad student would be invited to leave the program in the same way a grad student who failed to pass exams in other required foreign language skills/core grad courses would be.
. I hope he enjoys whatever he ends up picking!