Rosangel Flores-Rubio
The barrier between French and Spanish depicted on a bulletin board behind a teacher, is drawn and created digitally.
Walking down the third-floor language wing, Spanish words and phrases float out of almost every classroom. Continue down the hall and there are only two classrooms devoted to French. The ICCSD’s language program has changed a lot through the years, but one aspect has consistently remained the same: Spanish attracts the most students.
“I think that one of the biggest reasons [Spanish is chosen more than French] is that there’s a pervasive myth,” Jaclyn Ceurvorst, a Spanish and French teacher at City High, said. “[Many people] think that French is harder and Spanish is more useful and easier, but neither of those two things are necessarily true, especially about one language being easier than the other.”
Currently, approximately 720 students are enrolled in Spanish at City High compared to the 120 students enrolled in French. Similar to Ceurvorst, Jax Piker ‘23 also feels that French intimidates students away from being interested in learning the language. Having started learning Spanish in elementary school and beginning French during freshman year of high school, Piker has found unique challenges presented by both languages.
“The hardest thing about Spanish is understanding why [certain] things are the way they are. The actual rules might be simple, but there’s not always a real explanation for why some things are done a certain way,” Piker said. “In French, a lot of times [things are done for a reason], like because of a pronunciation rule. The hardest thing about French is there are so many specific words [and] putting them in the right place can be hard,” Piker said.
According to the United States Department of State on foreign language training, both French and Spanish are categorized as level one languages, meaning they take a similar number of hours to reach proficiency for a native English speaker. Tony Balcean, another French teacher at City High, agrees that French and Spanish have similar levels of difficulty.
“Scientifically, [the languages] are in the same category, so [French] is not harder,” Balcean said. “Some aspects of each, for different parts of the [learning] process, will be slightly easier than the other, but essentially they’re the same.”
Another prevalent idea driving students away from French is that the language is less useful and practical. In 2011, the Pew Research center found that besides English, Spanish is the most spoken language in the United States, with 37.6 million people speaking Spanish at home. French is fourth with 2.1 million speakers in the United States.
Piker feels that the reasoning of Spanish-speaking countries being much nearer to the United States does not show the entire picture. Instead, it depends more on what a person’s intentions for the language are.
“I started taking Spanish because of how everyone says, ‘We share a border with Mexico’,” Piker said. “French can be useful if you want to travel to a French-speaking country. Unless you’re going there, being able to speak Spanish doesn’t really make much of a difference. I think that’s a way that people justify their choice, but it’s not very accurate.”
Ceurvorst further explained that aside from being a language teacher, she used a relatively equal amount of French and Spanish in her day-to-day life.
“People perceive learning Spanish as more useful in their daily interactions with others, which might be a possibility,” Ceurvorst said. “Frankly, I spoke French just as often as Spanish when I worked at the mall, or when I was in grad school.”
Owyn Noble ‘24 previously took Spanish before switching to learning French. He noticed students also tend to lean more toward taking Spanish because of how commonly it is chosen and how this influences peers to choose the same language as their friends.
“When you look at your class sheet, Spanish is the most obvious [choice] you’re going to pick. So if people are picking classes, your friends [will more likely] be picking Spanish,” Noble said. “For Spanish, I’m pretty sure the majority of people are just taking it to get it done.”