German or Spanish: which should you learn?

Most "X or Y" language comparisons lead with difficulty and work backwards to a recommendation. This one works the other way round: German and Spanish are both in the easier half of the Foreign Service Institute's scale, so the time difference between them is real but not huge — six weeks of full-time study. What actually separates them is what you'd use each one for. Below is that comparison by goal — work, study, travel, then the grammar you'd be signing up for — closing with a table.

Updated 9 October 2026 · 6 min read

Work and the economy

German is the language of one very large, very concentrated economy. Germany is the largest economy in Europe and the third-largest in the world by nominal GDP, at roughly US$5.45 trillion. German is also, by native speakers, the most-spoken first language inside the European Union, and it is an official language — nationally or regionally — in six countries: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Belgium, where it is one of three national languages spoken by a small community in the east.

Spanish is the reverse shape: no single economy of that size behind it, but official status spread across far more ground. It is the national language of 21 countries and territories — Spain and Equatorial Guinea, plus nineteen across the Americas, from Mexico (its biggest, with about 130 million native speakers, more than twice Spain's own) down to Argentina, including Puerto Rico. And it has a huge domestic presence inside the United States itself: 41.8 million US residents aged five or older speak Spanish at home, about 13% of the population, even though Spanish has no official status there at all.

On raw numbers, Spanish is well ahead: about 519 million native speakers and roughly 117 million more as a second language, against German's 95 million native speakers and an estimated 80–85 million more worldwide. Numbers alone undersell German, though, because its speakers are concentrated in some of the wealthiest, most export-heavy economies in the world rather than spread thin.

So the work question comes down to geography. If your career points at Germany, Austria or Switzerland specifically, nothing else comes close. If it points at Latin America, or at a Spanish-speaking workforce or customer base already inside your own country, Spanish is the wider net.

Study: where you'd actually sit the exam

Both languages are backed by a government-funded institute that teaches them and certifies them almost everywhere. The Goethe-Institut runs more than 150 cultural centres across 99 countries, teaching German and administering the Goethe-Zertifikat exams from A1 to C2. The Instituto Cervantes is smaller in reach — 103 centres in 52 countries — and runs the DELE exams on behalf of Spain's Ministry of Education. Either way you are never far from somewhere that teaches and tests the language properly; Spanish simply has fewer dedicated branches relative to how many people speak it, because so much of its teaching already happens inside the school systems of 21 countries rather than through one cultural institute.

How many study hours each one actually costs, level by level, is measured properly in how long it takes to learn German and how long it takes to learn Spanish.

Travel: how far the language carries you

German covers a compact, well-connected block of central Europe: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and German-speaking Belgium are all a short train ride from each other, and the language barely changes between them.

Spanish covers a far bigger map — from the US border with Mexico to the southern tip of Argentina, across the Caribbean, and in Spain and Equatorial Guinea — and the accents and vocabulary shift more across that distance than German's do across its much smaller range. That is the trade: German gives you a small, consistent area; Spanish gives you a continent and a half, with more variation to get used to along the way.

Difficulty: a wall of case endings, or a wall of irregular verbs

This is where the FSI numbers come apart. Spanish is Category I, at 30 weeks of full-time study; German is Category II, at 36. Six weeks is the gap, and it is not about words — on film and television dialogue, German's first 1,000 word forms actually cover slightly more of everyday speech (77.6%) than Spanish's do (75.0%). The extra weeks are spent entirely on grammar.

German's grammar puts its difficulty on the noun: 3 genders and 4 cases, which between them mean the word for "the" is spelled six different ways — der, die, das, den, dem, des — and those six spellings alone make up 5.7% of everything said in German. It is hard, but it is a closed, learnable system: once you know the rules, a new noun slots straight into them.

Spanish's grammar puts its difficulty on the verb. There are no cases and only two genders, but the handful of verbs that do the most work — ser and estar (both "to be"), ir, haber, tener, hacer — are irregular enough that their forms alone are 8.5% of everything said. On top of that sits the subjunctive, a whole second set of verb forms for wishes, doubts and things not yet real, used constantly and with almost no equivalent in English. Is German hard to learn and is Spanish hard to learn go through each in full, including where German ranks against every other language in the hardest languages for English speakers.

The decision

So which should you learn?

Choose German if Germany, Austria or Switzerland are the actual reason you are doing this — a job, a degree, a move — and you would rather front-load a dense but regular grammar than meet a wall of irregular verbs later. Choose Spanish if reach matters more than any single economy: more countries, more native speakers, and very likely a Spanish-speaking community already near you. Either way, start with the words you will actually hear first: Verbavia (our own course) teaches both free on the web, in any browser including on a phone, with the grammar explained rather than left for you to notice on your own.

The 1,000 most common German words and the 1,000 most common Spanish words are free and in frequency order; the German vocabulary test and the Spanish vocabulary test each take about two minutes. If Mandarin is also on your shortlist, the same kind of comparison, with a much bigger difficulty gap, is in Spanish or Mandarin.

Sources

• Foreign Service Institute, National Foreign Affairs Training Center: language learning timelines, checked 2026-09-25.
• Wikipedia: German language — official status in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Belgium; "the most spoken native language within the European Union"; checked 2026-10-09.
• Wikipedia: Economy of Germany — "the largest economy in Europe by nominal GDP," third-largest in the world, approximately US$5.45 trillion; checked 2026-10-09.
• Wikipedia: Spanish language — official in 21 countries and territories; Mexico's 130 million native speakers; 41.8 million US residents aged five or older speaking Spanish at home (13% of the population, 2020 census data); checked 2026-10-09.
• Wikipedia: Goethe-Institut — more than 150 cultural centres across 99 countries; checked 2026-10-09.
• Wikipedia: Instituto Cervantes — 103 centres in 52 countries, DELE exams; checked 2026-10-09.
• Wikipedia: German grammar — three genders, four cases.
• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. Every coverage figure is computed by scripts/frequency_curves.py and printed from its output rather than typed.