How Hard Is French to Learn After Learning Spanish?

Much easier than if you learned French only knowing English.

They are sister languages and a have a lot in common.

However, notable differences:

1. French pronunciation:

a. rules are numerous and complex, often depending on surrounding letters or lack thereof.

b. there are often silent letters, or letters that although are not pronounced, change the pronunciation of other letters.

c. sounds often must be inserted, removed, changed, or moved beyond syllable/word boundaries to please the French ear.

d. Unlike English and Spanish, French is mostly a syllable-timed language. Most syllables get equal stress. Only the very last syllable of a sentence is stressed.

e. French is spoken in rhythmic groups, where the tone of the voice is raised at the end of each group, except for the very last group (unless it's a question).

f. There are a number of sounds that exist in neither English nor Spanish.

2. writing: French uses five accent marks. It does not use the tilde at all.

3. grammar:

a. French, like English, usually requires the subject be stated, unlike Spanish.

b. verbs - although there are six person/number categories as in Spanish, there are rarely six distinct written forms. It's often only five or fewer. In addition, some of those written forms often have the same pronunciation despite different spellings, so there may be as few as three distinct spoken forms.

c. ser and estar are both translated by être.

d. there is no progressive aspect in French.

e. nouns: many French nouns have no suffixes, so no clue about its grammatical gender. Even when there are suffixes, there are almost always exceptions, if there is a gender that dominates that suffix (and sometimes there isn't). That means genders must be memorized.

However, Spanish and French words descending from the same Latin word (even if they now have different meanings), usually have the same gender (with few exceptions).

f. vocabulary: Many French words will be either similar to Spanish words (because they both descend from Latin), or to English words (because English borrowed a ton of words from Old French roughly 1000 years ago, and they are now fully English words). Although the pronunciations are often very different in either language.

4. Both languages are among the easiest languages for an English speaker to learn. Knowing a fair amount of Spanish will reduce the number of study hours needed to reach competency by an appreciable amount.

5. No language is easy. All require a lot of time and effort. French will be easier than many other choices, but not easy.

Well, I' m a native Spanish speaker... When reading French I can see some similarities between french and Spanish... However such similarities pretty much vanish when it comes to understanding spoken french. On the other hand, I can see pretty big similarities between Spanish and Italian and between Spanish and Portuguese.

God bless you.

Let me just tell you it is dead easy at the beginning and I can say so becuase my friend is Spanish and says it is really easy in our French course becuase a lot of words are really similar, and most vocabulary words would have an a at the end while French would hve an e

The languages are quite similar but you have to remember that consonants at the end of French words are silent unless the next word starts with a vowel. You also will find yourself thinking of the Spanish word when you are trying to come up with the French one.