is german or spanish better?

Hi,
It really depends on what do you plan on doing with the new language.

If you decide to read Spanish books or travel to Spanish, it's better to learn Spanish, vice versa, if you would like to learn more about German books and German authors, you would want to learn German and read the works in their original language, or maybe travel to Germany. (or that you have many friends or bf/gf speaking that language).

I've never learned German, but I learned some Spanish before, it wasn't very difficult, a lot of the words are very similar to English words, in fact, many words are spelled the same in both English and Spanish but only different slightly pronunciations.

Also, if you already learned some Japanese or plan on learning Japanese in the future, learning Spanish now can provide you with a very good foundation, because their alphabets pronunciations are almost identical such as the letters 'RA, in both Japanese and Spanish are pronounced as 'LA instead of RA.

Another advantage is that if you decide to learn Italian later on after learning the language of Spanish, you will find it lots easier because also, they have many similarities in phrases, sentences, spellings and pronunciations.

hope that helps.

if you are a native english speaker, you should try spanish because most words are mostly the same( English comes mostly from spanish and spanish comes from Latin). For example: Fruit in Spanish is fruta, football(soccer) is fútbol, chocolate is chocolate, and salad is salada. There are many cognatesin Spanish whereas most words are kinda different in German. Spanish pronunciation is easier since it is similar to english and Italian. Spanish is more useful since it is spoken in many countries including Spain, North america and South America. Whereas German is only spoken in Germany.But you should pick the language that you are most interested in.
P.S. I am also learning Spanish in my school!

What is your definition of "better?" Spanish is used in more countries (most of Latin America, Mexico, many states in the US with large Mexican population, and Spain) around the world than German (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein), and if you speak Spanish well, you can understand Portuguese with little problems and should comprehend enough Italian.

Grammar-wise, German is more complicated than Spanish because German has three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), one more than Spanish (masculine and feminine), and the plural form can take on different endings (usually -n or -en) and may require a shift in vowel, whereas Spanish nouns only require an additional s at the end for their plural form.

Verb conjugation (changing of verb depending on person and tense) is more or less complicated in both language. If you cannot handle the three forms in English verbs, you will probably have a hard time remembering the five or six forms just for present tense (yes, I, you, he, we, you, they each take a different verb ending). Secondary verbs in German are located at the end of a sentence. (For example: "I like to see a movie" will be structured as "I like a movie to see.")

In terms of pronunciation, Spanish is marginally easier because there are only pure vowels, but you need to deal with the "r" and "b/v" sounds that do not exist in English. I assume that you speak Cantonese, so you should have no problem pronouncing the ö, ü, or z sounds. If you speak Mandarin, you have also overcome the ch sound - it's the same as "h" and "x" in hanyu pinyin. All other consonants and vowels sounds are identical to those in English.

Which one you should learn depends on your motive of learning these languages.