secondary school:1st year language choice

My son will be starting secondary school Sept '08 - will have to choose between French, Spanish or German by next Feb. They are doing very basic French at primary school at the moment (which he hates)!! Any views out there - is any one easier to learn than the other etc ??

Re: 1st year language choice

I believe Spanish is the easiest of these to learn. My old school offered only French and German but did do Spanish for the remedial class so they could have the foreign language necessary for leaving cert.

I took French and loved it but also did some private German. Spanish I've learned since school and I do think it's the easiest to learn from the beginning.

The Work, Careers, Un/employment, Further Education/Training forum on Askaboutmoney deals with Employment Rights, Career Issues and Adult Education, Training and Development. It really isnt geared up for the discussion of Primary/Secondary School issues.

It depends why he hates French really. It could be because it seems hard to pronounce, if so I would say Spanish would be similar but German would be easier. On the other hand I think the grammar and word order in German is quite difficult so I believe it's actually the hardest of the 3.

Is there any way he could have something tangible to persuade him - are you likely to holiday in one of the countries in the near future? Does he support a foreign football team? Does he like German/French food? It's a tough decision to make but if he is part of the decision he may have a better attitude when he starts.

When I started secondary school everyone was told that German was going to be one the most widely spoken languages in the world as the German businesses were so succesful.
Now there was a false predication.

Go with Spanish, it'll be handy when he goes backpacking around South America

yeah i really regretted not picking spanish in school... it's so widely spoken...
went travelling around south america and was kicking myself for not being able to speak more than the basics.... i am learning it at home now and really enjoy being able to understand spanish when i hear it in tv shows or on the street.. a lot of tv shows seem to have spanish speaking characters (prison break, heroes) and i'm chuffed when i can pick up a sentence or two!.. either way it is not a life or death choice for him, he can always learn another language later in life if he needs to..

Which is easiest to learn?

First of all those he have an aptitude for langauges? if he does then they will be more or less equally easy to learn. If not Spanish has easiest grammar structure, Germany closest to English (thanks to the good old Angles and Saxons), French most complex grammar.

Don't get too caught up on usefulness or otherwise of a specific langauge. If that was the case mandarin Chinese would surely be the choice.

Mr Toad said:

Germany closest to English (thanks to the good old Angles and Saxons), French most complex grammar.

Click to expand...

that's debatable, German grammar is a lot to learn - masculine, feminine, neuter and plural as well nominative, accusative, dative and genitive and that's just the articles! French by comparison has just "le", "la" and "les".

From my own experience, most students find Spanish the easier of the three to learn - probably because the pronunciation is fairly straightforward and they can begin to verbalise easy phrases fairly quickly. It may be significant that Spanish is often the language taken by students in the lower ability groups and by Leaving Cert Applied students.

Like a previous poster, I studied French up to a point and gave it up. I started Spanish classes recently and found it a lot easier to grasp.

In my opinion kids should choose the subjects which they are most interested in and happiest to learn rather than applying other strategic analyses to the decision (e.g. what's easiest, what points each will yield etc.).