What language is easier to learn, German or Spanish?

English belongs to the Germanic group of Indo-European language family. It essentially comes from German. However it has been heavily influenced by French during the Norman Conquest for a few hundred years for example that is farther away from German than before.

So, considering the significant decrease of inflections like case endings in English, you may find German quite difficult. There are adjective endings, verb conjugation, even definite articles change by case. You also need to deal with three genders, an aspect absent in English.

Spanish on the other hand belongs to Romance language group of Indo-European language family. Though it does not have neuter gender, it also has a rich inflection you have to deal with, though less demanding than German, relatively. Either way, you are choosing a language that is not so far from your native tongue.

At least you need not learn an exotic writing system, apart from a few new modified letters. Moreover, FYI, from a linguistic perspective, there is only one human language. The deepest structure is the same in all of us.

There is an innate language faculty in all humans. It is a genetic endowment called "Universal Grammar", theory put forth by Noam Chomsky. (No need to look into this unless you have scientific interest in the study of language) When learning a second(or third or more) language (past the age of rapid growth), one is studying its externalization.

Though it apparently differ significantly to ourselves, an alien intelligence looking at us would regard it as numerous dialectal variations of the same one language. In this sense, it is more or less the same thing whether you choose German, Spanish, Russian, Indonesian, Japanese, Ainu, Basque, or some remote Amazonian tribal language. A French speaker may learn Korean much faster than a Japanese speaker despite the remoteness of French and Korean and the linguistic kinship between Korean and Japanese, because the French speaker will be enticed to work hard to acquire the obviously exotic elements of Korean while the Japanese speaker may take it for granted and make less effort.

The converse can also be true. The Japanese may take advantage of the grammatical similarities and learn Korean faster than the French. You just never know.

So, good luck whichever you choose. I would take the one I like. It would not hurt to work on both simultaneously.

I know there a few words in Spanish that are close to English.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.