'Vive la France' or 'Viva España'? :-(

These days I have to face a hard decision: Shall I take French or Spanish or maybe even Dutch as my second foreign language beside English on the University? :(

I did some research and created a little comparision:

	Dutch	Spanish	French
	Nederlands	Español	Français
Native speakers	23 million	322 - 400 million	60 - 130 million
Total speakers	27 million	400 - 500 million	160 - 500 million
Rank native sp.	#40	#2	#9
Rank total sp.	#48	#3	#3 - #7

Dutch doesn't sound like a very important language in the world of business and I might agree with that, but it is kinda easy to learn for Germans like me and one language more won't harm anybody. What you can't see in the chart above is that Spanish is about to become more and more important with French declining.

Oh here are some languages I already speak (more or less)

	German	English	Chinese
	Deutsch	English	普通话
Native speakers	105 million	309 - 400 million	885 million
Total speakers	185 million	1.2 - 1.4 billion	990 million
Rank native sp.	#10	#3	#1
Rank total sp.	#10	#1 - #2	#1 - #2

I made my decision: I take Dutch and Spanish. But I am sure I will miss French... :(

At least I still remember the one and only sentence: "En France, il y a un magasin de chaussures" ;-)