For a monolingual English speaker which language, French or Spanish, would be better (more useful to know, easier to acquire, etc) to learn? Is it true that once one learns one of the Romance languages, because they are cognates of each other, it is then easier to learn another one? In other words, lets say one learned to speak Spanish first would that make it any easier to learn French?

I never learned French at all, but I can figure out bits of it from my Spanish. One of the big concepts is the gender assigned to nouns. Pens are feminine and pencils are masculine, so you get el lapiz, but la pluma. This is done in all of the Romance languages as far as I know so knowing the rules in one will help in the others. I think a lot of the sentence structure is similar as well, though I could be way off on that.

As for which to choose, I'd say it depends a lot on where you live. Most places in the US you'll find Spanish more useful, but it might be a lot different in parts of Canada. I would guess that those in the UK would get more use from French.

__________________
I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

We used to have French classes back in the day, down here. It used to be a pain for the Portuguese speaking fellows.

The romances of the Latium and Iberic peninsula are more closely related among themselves than French. It is easier to go from Spanish to Portuguese, or Catalan, or Italian, than going from Spanish to French.

I´d suggest Spanish as your second language.

__________________
If you're careful enough, nothing bad or good will ever happen to you.

Spanish.

It's the wave of the future, por favor.

Se habla un poco español, but I'm getting better at it.

__________________
A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

I live in the South of England - not far from France - but the colleagues and neighbours I have spoken to have favoured Spanish from a business point of view.

I did French in school, but I'd rather make a start on Spanish now than go back to improving my French.

I haven't heard any persuasive reasons for why Spanish is, as Maksutov says, the wave of the future, but people who seem to know what they're talking about tend to be quite adamant about it. I would be interested to hear the reasons.

1) Spain is the EU economy that grows the most.
2) The Spanish speaking population in the US is growing fast.
3) Latin American markets are on the rise

Plus, it is always a pleasure to read Borges in the original version.

__________________
If you're careful enough, nothing bad or good will ever happen to you.

QFT. Spanish is the way to go if you are anywhere near America.

__________________

Here's some information about that, amigo.

French is dying. The colonial period is over. Plus any language that has too many vowels for simple sounds and is best pronounced with a lisp is rightfully doomed.

BTW, in a strange case of being prescient, I took a year of Spanish in 5th grade back in the 1950s. Little did I know...

__________________
A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

Which is more useful depends which places you want to go to. In general French will be more useful in Africa and Europe, and Spanish in the Americas.

Spanish is spoken (or used as a lingua franca) in Spain, Latin America (except Brazil and the Guyanas), and several parts of the Caribbean, and a few odd corners elsewhere.

Spanish is very similar to Portuguese and Italian. You can quickly pick these up from Spanish. Portuguese is spoken (or used as a lingua franca) in Portugal, Brazil, a handful of African countries, and a few other odd corners.

French is spoken (or used as a lingua franca) in France, parts of Belgium and Switzerland, parts of Canada, quite a lot of countries in northern and western Africa, some Pacific islands, parts of the Caribbean, bits of SE Asia, and a few other odd corners. It is more widely understood than Spanish by assorted Europeans who learned it at school, though this is largely becoming confined to an older generation.

French is rather less similar to Spanish, Portuguese and Italian than the latter are to each other. For the English speaker, the effort of learning Spanish is only slightly, not hugely, reduced by already knowing French. Spanish probably helps learning French to a somewhat greater degree than the other way around, but it is still learning a rather different language. Of course if your first language is something entirely different, like Chinese, Arabic, Turkish or Yoruba, then French and Spanish will seem a lot more similar to each other.

It has been demonstrated that English schoolchildren pick up some useful Spanish rather more quickly/easily than French. Not that the language learning (in-)capabilities of the English prove very much. I think more rapid progress in Spanish comes from the initial barrier that exists in French from Points a and b below. It isn't all one way though. Once you have got past the a and b issues, then c, d and e take over, and at a higher level Spanish becomes more difficult. Personally, I found French easier than Spanish, but I had more exposure to French from an earlier age, and so I do not find a and b a problem. In fact I pronounce French too well for my own good, because French aren't used to a Englishman pronouncing their language so well and in consequence speak too quickly to me for me to understand them. Although I now speak Spanish more fluently than French (having spent an extended period in Latin America), I still find French rather easier to read (because of d).

The issues are:

a) Spanish spelling is mostly phonetic (fairly strict pronunciation/spelling rules, very few words that sound the same as each other) but French has weird spelling with lots of silent letters and exceptions, and many words that are spelled differently but sound the same as each other.

b) French pronunciation is generally more difficult for English-speakers to master than Spanish. You can pretty much work out how to pronounce Spanish from a description in a book, but French is so weird that you really need someone present to give live examples.

c) Spanish grammar is somewhat more complicated: in practice, you have to learn and actively use a lot more grammatical endings and other word modifications in Spanish than French.

d) French word-order is fairly strict and rather English-like, but Spanish word order is rather less English-like and more flexible. People who fail to make progress in Spanish often do so because they fail to get an intuitive grip of Spanish word order concepts.

e) French vocabulary has more obvious and numerous similarities with English than does Spanish.

It's Spanish you need to lisp for, at least European Spanish. Most French seem incapable of producing a th sound.

Colonialism, in the sense of repression of an aboriginal population and destruction of their culture, is alive and well in many parts of the world. The "liberation" of many colonial countries (especially in the Americas) was in fact the consolidation of the control of that country into the hands of the colonists themselves, with reduced interference from their country of origin, rather than any decolonisation.

Mandarin.

Oops, sorry, that wasn't one of the choices.

__________________
As above, so below

The "liberation" of many colonial countries (especially in the Americas) was in fact the consolidation of the control of that country into the hands of the colonists themselves

Well, historians are that see Portugal being freed from Brazil in 1822.

__________________
If you're careful enough, nothing bad or good will ever happen to you.

IMO, mandarin is never going be spoken by the masses out of China. And it is yet to be proven that [economically] China is not on a hen´s flight.

__________________
If you're careful enough, nothing bad or good will ever happen to you.

Guess Spanish in the Americas is pronounced a bit "harder" then. That may be true in a few instances, but to heck with the "th" hang-up. Au contraire, mon cherie. Let's hear you say Beaujolais without sounding lispish.Good definition of colonialism. But a lack of understanding of its demise. Not sure what that has to do with its relation to the spread or entropy of a particular language.

More to the point, Dutch is still spoken in a local manner in Indonesia, but is dying off. Ditto with French in Senegal, Guiana, Haiti, etc. As the colonial influence wanes, the imposed language does likewise. Either the native tongue(s) or a more popular, useful language then takes over.

Hence Spanish.

__________________
A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

Actual Spain Spanish uses the th sound in place of the s sound which means that things like grathiath (gracias), and thoy de Barthelona, can be used to pick a Spaniard out of a group of Latin Americans with ease. I used to work with a guy from Mexico who used to have a lot of fun with the Spanish accent. I also ended up translating (as best i could) warranty information at Circuit City for a guy from Madrid. The th is very obvious. At first I wasn't even sure it was Spanish.

__________________
I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

All four of these reasons are convincing. Thanks!

I'll read the rest (including Mak's link) later.

Spanish is the easier language as well: fewer irregularities, and the pronunciation rules are more straightforward.

__________________
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Spanish, because French just sounds so foul.

When you pronounce Cecilia as thay-thee-lee-a (both th's unvoiced) as it is in thtandard thpanith, to me that thoundth like lithping. The Spanish even call it lisping, and have a legend that it arose from courtiers imitating a lisping king in flattery (though the legend is false). Even in American spanish, syoo-dhadh (ciudad) sounds like a lisp because of the th/dh sounds used for d. I don't hear any lithp in bow-zher-lay: zh is a sound lispers may have difficulty with. In general, European Spanish sounds more like a machine-gun and than American Spanish. So I would say the former is harder, but what kind of sounds sound hard or soft, as I have discovered in arguments with my Czech partner, is very subjective.

I wonder if you are confusing "lisping", a speech defect caused by lack of control ove