How to Learn Any Language 47
Spanish
Spanish seems to be the “natural” second language for Americans, owing to our proximity to the Spanish-speaking centres of North, Central, and South America and the growing prevalence of Spanish in our country. It’s easier for Americans to speak good Spanish than good French. It’s a more phonetic language and you don’t have the problem of the last few letters of a word being silent – as you often do in French. Also, correct Spanish pronunciation is less difficult than correct French pronunciation.
Spanish grammar is similar to French (as is that of all other Romance languages), and the subjunctive tense waits to test your character.
There are some happy surprises in store for Spanish learners. Of course you expect Spanish to carry you through Latin America and Spain, but you may not expect to be able to communicate with the older generation in the Philippines and even with Sephardic Jews in Israel (as well as Greece, Turkey, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria) whose vernacular is a language known as Ladino, a fifteenth and sixteenth century Spanish with a Hebrew admixture that is written in the Hebrew alphabet. Spanish offers perhaps the grandest of good deal opportunities. Whoever learns Spanish holds an option to acquire Portugese at half price.
Portugese
Don’t dismiss Portugese as some kind of slurring, overnasalised cousin of Spanish.
The lightning population growth of Portugese speaking Brazil alone makes Portugese a major world language. Ancient Portugese navigators carried the language to the mid-Atlantic, the African countries of Angola and Mozambique, the enclave of Goa in India, and even the Indonesian island of Timor.
Portugese is the ninth most widely spoken language in the world, after Chinese, English, Hindi-Urdu, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, German, and Indonesian. Thus, Portugese is an intelligent choice for the language “shopper” who wants to be different without abandoning the mainstream.
Portugese nasal sounds are easier than the French and the grammar is only slightly more difficult than Spanish. Because I learned Spanish first, Portugese will always sound to me like Spanish that’s been damaged on delivery. (That’s just a smile, not an insult. Dutch sounds the same way to anyone who’s first studied German, Danish sounds that way to anyone who’s first studied Norwegian, and Serbo-Croatian definitely fits the description to anyone who’s first studied Russian.)