Hi guys!
I am curious how different Spanish is from French, and what effect the learning process has when learning Spanish after French? I know there is a lot of overlap in vocabulary, but what about structures/grammar/sounds etc (anything really)?
I am just curious really 
You’ll get a huge discount, structures, grammar, conjugations are similar. There are a few things that differ, such as the use of the subjunctive in some cases, the difference between ser and estar or the use of the gerund (but this third point shouldn’t be a problem for an English speaker), but other than that it’s pretty transparent. Not as much as Spanish/Portuguese of course, or even French/Italian but still… All these four languages belong to the same family and thus work the same way.
Spanish also has the advantage of being phonetic, you’ll find that the spelling is much more logical than that of French (or English for that matter). As for sounds, except the “R” I don’t think there’s any particular difficulty in Spanish for an English native speaker. They can speak very fast though. 
well spanish is a more phonectic language it is spelled how it is written once you know the alphabet there is no problem in speaking or reading any word
in vocabulary there is not that great deal of overlap with french from what i see yes they are some words that look similar but not that much ,
the one thing you have to watch out for is that spanish is spoken in over 20 countries ,there is a great deal of accents and diferent vocabulary in every spanish country which can be difficult to understand at first even for people that speak it fluently
gramatically they are very similar some people might say certain things are easier in one and more difficult in the other but but i don’t think it’s a huge problem
if you have a good grounding in one then there is no reason why you can not learn the other
I agree more with Jorgis than ktj200 here. Shared vocabulary is huge and structures, conjugations have a strong resemblance, althougg there are differences, of course
yes ftornay is right i don’t why i wrote that i wanted to say the opposite i was multitasking replying to diferent things at the same time on diferent sites
Thanks for the reply, thats a great response ^_^!
I knew the romance languages were quite similar (having studied French and Romanian), but I was unsure how much faster progress I would make in Spanish knowing French!)
No problem :), we have all been there!
Thank you for your response, it was still really useful for me!
What’s been said here is right: French and Spanish are closely related languages.
However, it’s hard to predict how “easy” it’ll be for you to pick up Spanish. Learning a language is always hard. Otherwise all French speaking people would speak Spanish and viceversa, which is hardly the case.
I’d advise to check out sphaisell’s threads on this forum and his blog. He went the opposite way to you: he learned French after reaching a high level in Spanish (he’s also a native English speaker)
Ah of course! I am not suggesting that it doesn’t take a long time to learn a language, regardless of how close it is to a language you speak. But I was more curious as to how much faster someone who speaks French could move onto authentic content in Spanish. So could they progress onto novels much faster than if they have never had that French learning