O.K. so you’ve been studying Spanish for a while and using your language skills whenever and wherever you can. Now you wonder, for the sake of mental challenge and for adding something new and different to your life, if you can add an additional language to your list of studies.
If you decide that this is what you will venture into, you need then to decide what your second foreign language will be. Do you decide on the basis of which language you might use when you travel? Let’s say you, like Ira Riklis, would like to travel in France so French would come in handy and make your travels more enjoyable. Will your decision be based on with whom you might converse? Maybe you have a friend whose native language is Russian and you then would have an opportunity to practice your Russian language skills when talking with this friend. Perhaps you might think like many Americans that Chinese is “the new Spanish” and so you will want to prepare for the future by studying some form of Chinese.
Well give yourself a break and make your second foreign language one that may be challenging but not so difficult that you might become easily discouraged such as one with a different alphabet from English (Russian or Chinese). Ira Riklis knows that you might also find that another Romance language such as French may be so close to Spanish that you will find at this time the study of both Spanish and French “cross contaminated”. So how about German? It is close enough in some ways to English, handy in travel, and different from Spanish so as to prevent accidentally using a Spanish word for a German one.