A friend told me recently her goal in life is to learn all the major romance languages, namely French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian. This sounds like a great goal to me. Just imagine being able to travel anywhere in Latin America and large swaths of Europe, being able to speak to the locals in their native tongue and really getting to know the culture! Fortunately for her, she already speaks Spanish.
Every romance language shares a common trait: they are descendants of Latin. Even today, the romance languages have far more similarities with each other than they have differences, most notably vocabulary. About 85% of the vocabulary between Spanish and Portuguese, for example, are similar enough to be mutually intelligible in both languages. Similarly, the lexical similarity between Spanish and French/Italian is around 80% and with Romanian, 60%. Obviously, a solid grounding in the Spanish language will give learners of the other romance languages a huge head start.
Vocabulary isn't the only attribute romance languages have in common: they also share many grammatical similarities. The subjective tense in French works much the same as in Spanish, and Italian verb tenses are conjugated in much the same way as in other romance languages. Since these two characteristics are often the most difficult for speakers of English to learn, mastering them in Spanish will give you a leg up on the competition learning them in say French or Catalan.
Why Spanish first? After all, learning Italian first will give you as much of a head start in learning Spanish as vice versa. There are two reasons why I think most Americans should learn Spanish as their first romance language. First, Spanish is becoming increasingly more common in North America. Italian may be more chic, but Spanish will be infinitely more useful. Second, Spanish is probably the easiest romance language to learn. Since your first foreign language is always the most difficult, it makes sense to start out easy and save the more difficult romance languages, like French, for later.
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Spanish Pimsleur and
Rosetta Stone Spanish reviews to make an informed decision.
