I guess deciding which of the Romance langages to learn would depend on how you might use it. Of course there are lots of other languages and families of languages to learn too. Russian and Arabic come to mind these days. With German family heritage I tried German as high school freshman, but the grammar and “the” completely destroyed me and I quite. Sophomore year I started Spanish, and “the” was much simpler. Then it was direct and indirect object that gave me a lot of trouble until something clicked. I did 2 more years and decided to major in Spanish in Csollege. One semester I was taking spoken Spanish and French and grammar translation Italian, interspersed by 2 science courses to clean my mind between classes. Then Sputnic flew and I decided to be a science major. I subsequently got a job as a bilingual Spanish/English secretary for an international NGO with a 10% bonus for the second language. In later years I was self-employed and renovated property. Spanish was extremely useful since US education has sadly neglected educating our native born citizens in the construction trades.
So I would say it is important to think about how you might use whatever language you choose to learn. I was interested in travel and was thinking Latin America. In fact in the NGO job we also had a chance to study some Brazilian Portuguese as we had offices there and I had to read letters and see to whom or what files they should go. If you have to deal with renovation or construction in the US, Spanish will be useful. If your heritage is Portuguese you might want to make that your first Romance language. Travel or research goals would also be a consideration for what language to study.
As to difficulty, I agree Spanish is much easier to speak or write as it does sound like it spells. Italian is also easier in that regard. Portuguese and especially French are a lot harder to pronounce and spell, although French has somewhat more words that are now included in English. Verb endings change a great deal more in Romance languages than they do in English. I was surprised to discover that Subjunctive verb forms are used almost half the time. Having grown up with a first generation German/American mother I see that is a very different life viewpoint. What a difference there is between mother’s “”clean out the garage, and that’s an order, and a Spanish “I hope you get the garage cleaned today.” The German mind expects the garage will be cleaned. The Hispanic mind hopes the garage “might” be cleaned today, In the first case Indicative verb endings are used, in the second case Subjunctive verb endings are used. The two past tenses also require constant monitoring while speaking Spanish. You always have to decide if the past action is permanent or temporary but perhaps ongoing.
Its amazing that little kids can do it but we adults find it much harder, but still fun if you can share your learning with others. My husband was training for a foreign job. This was when Castro was taking over Cuba, so he had to learn Spanish. Then problems started in Africa and they wanted him to learn French. Finally he ended up doing a survey in Brazil and he had to learn Portuguese. I had a South American friend with a brother who wanted to learn English. He and my husband spent many hours together sharing their ignorance of the other’s language, but learning as they went. Once he told them I could not visit because I was sick from eating too much cake. The fact that cake and poop sound similar in Spanish caused him to make an amusing mistake. Another time he was saying “I can’t,” which when mispronounced is “I fart.” He finally spent 4 months traveling throughout Brazil and Peru. Brazil was a more fun job than Peru.
My reason for studying another language is pretty simple. I always wanted to and now that I’m retired I have the time and need something to keep my brain going.
My reason for choosing Portuguese is maybe silly.
When I was a child we only got two stations on TV. On Sundays one of the stations had documentaries about other countries, their languages, history and culture. I might have been 10 years old when I saw a documentary about Brazil. I remember it was winter, cold, maybe a foot of snow on the ground and the TV was showing me beautiful beaches, green forests and jungles and not a flake of snow in sight! I was laser fixed on the wonder on the TV. It didn’t hurt that all the women were beautiful and the men happy. I’ve had an infatuation with Brazil ever since then.
Anyway, the language study is keeping my mind from getting rusty at least and is rewarding in itself.
it is fascinating to me that indo-european developed the entire gender/declension/conjugation system in complete illiteracy. (the remnants of it are present in most of the IE languages which maintain declensions with genders). it works the other way, of course, the declensions were needed to define how the words related to each other, and would let word order be a lot more flexible.
for an american, with no gender and only two declensions (genetive and nominative), it is a great struggle to learn when to use accusative and dative. throw in having to decline adjectives/adverbs etc. german still has some of that, icelandic has all of it I believe except dual tense, russian has some/a lot of it.
there is some thought among more learned folks than I that language structure influences cultural patterns/behavior.
An example is japanese (highly structured language with all kinds of specific social usage rules built-in). but i cannot commment intelligently on that beyond having read about it.
an example I can discuss is latin american spanish. you will recognize these. forgive the accents, ENG keyboard here.
we say ‘i missed the bus.’ my fault (implied).
sp. says ‘el bus me dejo` the bus left me. (not so much my fault)
I lost my wallet. (i did it)
mi cartera se perdio’. my wallet lost itself. (not me!)
I ran out of money. evasive but clearly I am involved in the reason there is no more money
Se me fue la plata. My money left me! it just sort of up and went away!