I recently watched a fascinating YouTube video where two people competed to see who could learn more French in a single week. One person used only Duolingo, while the other relied entirely on ChatGPT. At the end of the experiment, they tested their skills on the ESL language test website. Both ended up with very similar scores, though one edged ahead by just a couple of points.
Inspired by their experiment, I decided to test my own levels.
First up was French. To my surprise, I scored an A2.
I understood most of the questions without issue—my main bottleneck as a beginner is just that I haven't studied the formal grammar rules yet to know which specific option is the correct answer.
Next, I decided to test my Spanish. I’ve lived in Spain for 13 years now, so you’d expect a solid score. The result? B1—just two points higher than my French!
That difference is mind-boggling on paper, but it makes sense given how I learn. I’ve picked up all my Spanish purely by listening to people around me. I’ve never taken formal classes or drilled grammar because that style of learning just doesn't work for me—I'm an intuitive listener.
While my passive listening in Spanish is around a C1 level (I can understand fluent spoken Spanish in daily life), my active output lags behind at B1 because I never studied the rules. But more than that, testing my levels highlighted a deeper truth: I simply do not like the Spanish language.
Spanish does something that reminds me a lot of Finnish: it frequently drops explicit subject pronouns. You don't get a clear "you," "me," "they," or "them" sitting at the start of the clause. Instead, the pronoun is dropped completely, forcing you to decipher the tail end of the verb just to figure out who is doing what. To me, that feels like unnecessary mental gymnastics, and I find processing it exhausting rather than enjoyable.
French, on the other hand, is a breath of fresh air. It always explicitly tells you who is talking right at the beginning of the phrase. Beyond that, the massive shared vocabulary with English makes it wonderfully easy to follow.
There’s also something incredibly charming about decoding French. Take the little accent circumflex (the "funny hat") on words like fête. That accent acts as a historical marker showing that an S used to be there in the old form—feste.
The moment you see that, you can instantly trace it back to words like festival or festivity and know it has to do with celebrations. Decoding those built-in linguistic clues is deeply satisfying.
I have no desire to torture myself trying to perfect a language I don't enjoy and don't strictly need, even while living here.
So, I’m making a choice: I’m going all-in on French.
I’m genuinely excited to see how quickly my active French skills surpass my Spanish. There is something endlessly charming about French, and life is too short to force yourself through mental gymnastics for a language that doesn't spark joy.