Most languages are put in three tiers.
Tier one being easy languages to learn from Enlgish. i.e Spanish, Italian, other languages (Romance, Germanic?)
Tier two, being meduim amount of difficulty, i.e Swahili , I think Urdu and Hindi, ... ?
Tier three being harder languages to learn, i.e Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Basque, Icelandic, Japanese, Korean? ect..
I forget where I read this, and I'm so tired I forget what my point of showing this is..
I'd like to learn Spanish, as it doubles over as Italian and Portuguese, would I have a high difficulty learning Spanish knowing English as my native tongue, Irish as a second language, and French as a third?
@whiteguy: Well my first language is French, my second language Portuguese, my third language English, my fourth language Spanish... So yes, it's possible to learn Spanish after all that xD Si tu es bon en français, alors l'espagnol sera facile pour toi!
Hey, I was just peeking in here randomly out of curiosity. I don't actually study or speak French. >.>
It's true what the other poster said. If you're good at French, you'll have no trouble understanding a lot of written Spanish, at least. If you want proof of that, I could understand something like 80% of the conversation in French on this page and maybe more without knowing more than a few words of actual French because I know Spanish. A lot of the grammar and vocabulary are very similar between Spanish and French, so you'd just need to learn all the specific Spanish words and rules to be able to speak rather than just understand. The best part is that spelling and reading are much easier in Spanish than in French. I can hardly understand a thing when I
hear people speaking French, though--especially from Quebec. Two of my suitemates like to chat in French (one with a Parisian accent and one Quebec French), and I don't understand more than maybe one word in fifty from either of them when they do.
As for crossing over with Portuguese using Spanish, since Spanish and Portuguese are very very similar (if this were the Portuguese thread, I'd probably understand more like 90% of it), the combination of English, French, and Spanish would make reading most Portuguese and understanding a lot of it no problem for you even without actually learning Portuguese. There are just some basic Portuguese verbs you have to learn that are harder to immediately recognize from Spanish to understand basic conversations (falar vs. hablar, fazer vs. hacer, etc.) and some different pronouns (você).
Regardless, once you've reached a high level in one romance language, the hardest part is done and any new romance languages will be easy to pick up as long as you watch out for potential mix-ups. It shouldn't be difficult for you, no, because you wouldn't actually be starting at ground zero again. English also helps with Spanish sometimes; the number of cognates is pretty high and makes understanding a lot of new words easier. Add French and English cognates together and voila! you can understand a lot of vocabulary right off the bat, all while having a better reference than English for Spanish grammar because you know French.