Your First Foreign Language
Your First Foreign Language
Should probably be Spanish
If your mother tongue is English, the first foreign language that you study should probably be Spanish. For one thing, the language of Cervantes is delightfully regular, with consistent grammar and a reliable relationship between spelling and pronunciation. For another, Spanish provides a path into the realms of other Romance languages, whether those of the present day or those of the past.
Tools that you can use to learn Spanish abound. A visit to YouTube will provide you with lots of songs and television programs. A quick internet search will uncover a wide variety of parallel texts. (Search terms to use include “bilingual edition,” “bilingual text,” “Doppeltext,” and, of course, “parallel text.”) In addition to this, an immense number of works composed in other languages have been translated into Spanish. Thus, there is a good chance that you can find Spanish-language versions of some of your favorite books.
That is very true. I took two years of Spanish in High School, and quickly realized that Spanish opened the door for me to understand a bit of French, a little more latin, a bit of Italian, etc. From there, I learned a bit of german, and a bit of Russian. At the very least, I can ask where the bathroom is in 5 languages and then I can ask for a coke. lol.
For instance Donde is el Bano?
Où se trouvent les toilettes?
Dov'è il bagno
Ubi est latrina
Wo ist die Toilette
It's not always easy to translate, but you can eventually work it out.
I would say French could be the next best choice since not only those English derive a quarter of its words from it, its grammar is similar enough to English that it is not too hard to learn but different enough that it makes a gentle introduction to how odd the grammars of most languages can be.