Spanish VS French: Which is Harder?

The French Wikipedia (French: Wikipédia en français) is the French-language edition of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. This edition was started on 23 March 2001, two months after the official creation of Wikipedia.[1] It has 2,554,152 articles as of 20 September 2023, making it the fifth-largest Wikipedia overall, after the English-, Cebuano-, Swedish- and German-language editions, and is the largest Wikipedia edition in a Romance language. It has the third-most edits, and ranks 6th in terms of depth among Wikipedias. It was also the third edition, after the English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia, to exceed 1 million articles: this occurred on 23 September 2010.[1] In April 2016, the project had 4657 active editors who made at least five edits in that month.

In 2008, the French encyclopaedia Quid cancelled its 2008 edition, citing falling sales on competition from the French edition of Wikipedia.[2]

As of September 2023, there are 4,752,000 users, 150 admins and 70,506 files on the French Wikipedia.[3]

On 2 December 2014, the French-language Wikipedia encyclopedia became the 3rd[4] linguistic edition by number of registered users since its creation, overtaking for the first time the German edition, with 2,022,504 registered users,[5][6] behind the English (23,300,456)[7] and Spanish (3,401,493)[8] language editions.

Statistics

The countries in which the French Wikipedia is the most popular language version of Wikipedia are shown in dark blue.

Page views by country over time on the French Wikipedia
The audience measurement company Médiamétrie questioned a sample of 8,500 users residing in France with access to Internet at home or at their place of work. Médiamétrie found that in June 2007, French Wikipedia had: 7,910,000 unique visitors that visited the site at least once during the month of June 2007 (compared to 4,355,000 unique visitors in June 2006); 2.7 visits per visitor during the period (2.0 visits in June 2006); had held the 12th position (21st in 2006) in "the Top 30 most visited sites in France, excluding Internet applications", according to the criterion of the number of unique visitors and 12th position in "the Top 30 most visited sites in France, including Internet applications", like eMule or Real Networks (22nd position in June 2006).

Spanish (español or lengua española) or Castilian (lengua castellana) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from colloquial Latin spoken on the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. Today, it is a global language with about 474.7 million native speakers, mainly in the Americas and Spain.[1] Spanish is the official language of 20 countries. It is the world's second-most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese;[5][6] the world's fourth most spoken language overall after English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu); and the world's most widely spoken Romance language. The country with the largest population of native speakers is Mexico.[7]

Spanish is part of the Ibero-Romance group of languages, which evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in Iberia after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. The oldest Latin texts with traces of Spanish come from mid-northern Iberia in the 9th century,[8] and the first systematic written use of the language happened in Toledo, a prominent city of the Kingdom of Castile, in the 13th century. Spanish colonialism in the early modern period spurred on the introduction of the language to overseas locations, most notably to the Americas.[9]

As a Romance language, Spanish is a descendant of Latin, and has one of the smaller degrees of difference from it (about 20%) alongside Sardinian and Italian.[10] Around 75% of modern Spanish vocabulary is derived from Latin, including Latin borrowings from Ancient Greek.[11][12] Alongside English and French, it is also one of the most taught foreign languages throughout the world.[13] Spanish does not feature prominently as a scientific language; however, it is better represented in areas like humanities and social sciences.[14] Spanish is also the third most used language on internet websites after English and Chinese.[15]

#vs #french #spanish

[marcaustin]

I tried to learn both and found Spanish MUCH easier to grasp. I loved that the vowel sounds stay constant in spanish and in my experience - spanish speakers i knew and interacted with were more helpful and patient to my gringo attempts. When i tried to speak in french - more than one person mentioned i sounded like an arab trying to pronounce the words. It was maddening. Great video !

[indiegamerred]

I'm from the USA and I will say that Spanish is easier than French. With Spanish, all you need is a rough understanding of the language and you can probably guess what is being said. With French... good luck understanding that.

[sdwill]

2 years of Latin & French in high school. French came easily to me (as far as reading it). Kept up a casual interest in learning French over the years. Now I'm an old codger and I thought I'd try to learn a bit of Spanish. What a revelation! So much easier! I wish I'd started years ago.

[coolbrotherf]

As a native English speaker and as someone who studied Latin for a few years, Spanish is by far easier for me to learn. Plus, there's a lot of Spanish speakers around the Southern US where I live so I'm exposed to it a lot in my daily life more than French.

[gaiamaietti]

I studied French for 9 years, 8 at school and the 9th at the first year of university, where I had the opportunity to study 3 languages and I chose English, Spanish and French, but from the 2nd year of Uni we can only study two and I chose English and Spanish. At uni I started studying Spanish (october 2022) for the first time, and after a year I can say that I feel more fluent in Spanish than in French (I'm Italian)

[mirekmontepuro]

French spelling is way more consistent than English. When you hear a word in French you might not know how to spell it, but at least when you read a French word you know how to pronounce it. Nothing to do with the evil chaos of English.

[keithkannenberg]

As an American who is close to fluent in French (I don't get nearly enough practice to claim actual fluency) I can say that the immense number of cognates between English and French made learning vocabulary relatively easy. My sense is that there is more written lexical similarity between English and French than between English and Spanish, so if a person were only interested in reading French would be easier. But I might be completely biased by the amount of time I've spent studying French and minimal time with Spanish.

[TheRavenir]

As a native speaker of Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish is much, much, MUCH easier than French. I've actually learned both Spanish and French, and while French has always felt like a completely foreign language to me with some familiar words here and there, Spanish is so close to Portuguese that I've never had to expend much effort into learning it at all.

[RobertMihalache]

As a Romanian native I can say both can be easy to comprehend, pronounce and make a conversation but in the same time can be a hard task depending on the context and depending on the accent too. Nice video. Well done.

[EirMikah]

As a native French speaker who studied Spanish in high school and is studying it, I agree that from a non-native perspective, French is harder than Spanish.
For the progressive tense (in I am eating) orally, we can both say « je suis en train de manger » or « je mange ». We tend to more use the latter, as it’s easier and applicable to all situations where the « en train » construction would sound weird.
Ex: Je vais au parc (I am going to the park).
And for spelling, I agree, French is definitely more difficult
ex: the « ch » can be pronounced as a [k] sound as in « une chorale » (a choral) or a [ch] sound as in « une chanson » (a song).

[EVPaddy]

I had 8.5 years of Fench in school. Spanish was easier for me. But I’d say every additional romance language gets easier compared to the ones you learned before.

[Epsilonsama]

As native Spanish speaker who is learning French, while I might be biased In my honest opinion French is much harder than Spanish. The language has more vowels for one, Spanish has 5 while French has 13+. And no that + is not there for show but because depending who you ask it might be 13 all the way to 16. Also it has tons of nasal consonants that are not found in other Romance languages and even in English for that matter. The spelling is while not as crazy as in English it still not the breeze that's Spanish in comparison. French is definitely a fun language to learn but it's certainly not as easy as Spanish where I feel that 3 to 6 Months of serious Spanish learning will be able to understand the language while with French I feel it would take a longer time.

[josephleitao]

Para mim que sou brasileiro, o francês é muito mais difícil. O espanhol é muito semelhante ao português.

[RodrigoFernandez-tduk]

I knew a Polish guy, fluent in both languages, who said that "Spanish and French are almost the same language" 🤯. At least from the Spanish side, French pronunciation is hell and real life transparency is almost non existent.

[ivanovichdelfin]

¿Puedes hacer un vídeo de cuál es más difícil: "Inglés o español" y otro de "Portugués o francés"?

[kilanspeaks]

As an Indonesian speaker, Spanish is only easier when it comes to spelling and pronunciation as it is more similar to ours. As for the rest, grammar is difficult for both languages. Maybe my experience is not typical, but ultimately I find French’s to be easier.

You’re still going to struggle with genders and tons of conjugations for both, but at least you don’t have to try and wrap your head around concepts like “a mi me gusta” (or “mi piace” in Italian) which flips subjects and objects because it’s just “j’aime” in French, which is the same word order like “I like” in English. Vocabulary wise, there are more similarities between French and English (as the latter borrows a lot from the former) so that helps with recognizing the words.

[marielebreton]

I would love the opportunity to improve my French. I was born in the USA, my parents are haitian born and raised.
Growing up, I learned French, Haitian Creole and English. Then, learning Spanish in high school and college, I appreciated how much easier it was to speak and write in Spanish!

[ba]

I used to think French grammar was harder, but I'm no longer sure. (1) The subjunctive is more widespread in Spanish than in French. (2) Por and para are more difficult for an English speaker to get the hang of than pour and par. (3) Spanish has two verbs that mean "to be", while French, like English, has one. (4) At the beginner level, Spanish conjugation is arguably also harder - the verb in I eat, You eat, He/she eats, They eat, We eat (if you use "on" instead of "nous", as most French speakers do in daily convo) has the exact same pronunciation in French, while in Spanish they each of their own different pronunciation.

[MsNahualita]

I’m a native Spanish speaker (Mexican) & grew up in California. I learned French in high school and university and did a few semesters abroad in France. I personally found French very intuitive and “easy”. I have to say that I was completely in love with this language, and so thoroughly enjoyed studying it and learning it. For the past years, I’ve been trying to learn German and it has been definitely a harder process and experience.

[FrenchLightningJohn]

im french from québec, here we roll our "R" and here we say "je mange" instead of "je suis en train de manger", so closer to english with their "i am eating"