User blog comment:Razlem/How do you prefer to learn a language?/@comment-1883086-20100722002044

Lol, Razlem, you're completely forgetting that French and Spanish are notorious for being in a group called "the Romance languages", which in turn are, along with English, notorious for having a great number of irregularities. I know about 35% of French's verbs are generally irregular, and Spanish's verbs go through funky root changes (like "o" becoming "ue" in various verbs, i.e. poder = puedo, acordar = acuerdo, etc.) And you're forgetting that there's more to a language than its written side. If a written language was it, people would be learning Norwegian Bokmål, Swedish, and even English with no trouble -- but languages don't work that way. You forget French has a sandhi effect which ultimately kills a learner or helps a learner (he eats = il mange, they eat = ils mangent, ipa: /il mɑ̃ʒ/ for both of them.) and Chinese has a tonal sandhi, which changes a preceding vowel's tone to acompany the next (note "nǐ hǎo" is actually pronounced like "ní hǎo" or "nì hǎo".)

You're completely underestimating languages because, I hope you don't get offended by this, but it seems like you haven't actually had a legit lesson, and by lesson, I mean having someone tell you what's right and what's wrong, rather than relying on your own. I can tell you right now that looking at French as if it were Spanish is a big mistake. It'll help a little -- such as when to use the Subjunctive, and as a reminder to ALWAYS use a relative pronoun -- for Spanish speakers do get a little bit of an upper hand, but ultimately, you'll crash if you depend on Spanish to learn French. That's how it is for any language, really. I'm sure a Norwegian could go to Sweden, completely understand everything, but when actually learning Swedish, would screw up numerous times from the tendencies to revert back to his or her own Norwegian tongue.