Easiest MFL GCSE: Spanish vs French vs German compared

If you're picking a language at GCSE and you've been Googling which is easiest, the honest answer is that nobody can tell you.

Easier really depends on you. Maybe you did some French at primary school, so you've already got some grounding. Maybe you love watching Drag Race España so you're already hearing Spanish and feel more motivated by it. Or maybe you just really like the German teacher at your school.

What we can show you is how the grading has shifted over the last couple of years, and what each language actually asks of you. That's the useful bit, and it's what the rest of this article is about.

For years, the lore was that French and German were being graded more harshly than other GCSEs of a similar difficulty. A student who got a 6 in geography might walk away with a 5 in French. Over time this put a lot of people off picking them.

There might have been some truth in the rumours, because in summer 2023 and summer 2024 Ofqual did something about it. They made French and German grading more generous, in two steps, to bring them in line with Spanish and with other GCSEs. Spanish didn't need adjusting, so it wasn't touched.

The practical knock-on is that the three languages are now much closer in grading than they were pre-2024. Any guide you read written before 2024 is probably out of date on this.

On top of that, the three main boards (AQA, Pearson Edexcel and Eduqas) brought in new specifications that were sat for the first time in summer 2026. New spec codes, slightly different exam structures. For AQA that's French 8652, German 8662 and Spanish 8692. The first year of a new spec is always a bit noisy, so a settled picture needs another year of data.

Spanish has quietly become the biggest MFL at GCSE. It overtook French in 2025 and the gap keeps growing year on year.

If there's one reason Spanish feels approachable to a lot of students, it's the spelling. Once you've got how the vowels work, words sound the way they look. That matters more than it sounds, because it makes listening less of a guessing game and spelling mistakes rarer. The verbs are mostly regular in the common tenses, there's no case system to worry about, and because Spanish shares a lot of Latin roots with English you can half-guess a decent amount of vocabulary.

The bits that catch people out are the preterite (one of the past tenses) and the subjunctive. The preterite has a longer list of irregular stems than most students expect, so you'll be drilling those for a while. The subjunctive turns up more than it does in French or German, and you need to be comfortable using it to pick up the top-grade marks.

French is still one of the two biggest MFLs by entry size, more or less level with Spanish.

The thing French has going for it is vocabulary. Something like a third of English words came from French via the Norman conquest, which means you'll already recognise a lot of what you read without needing to look it up. That makes reading comprehension easier than you might expect going in.

The flip side is that French spelling doesn't really match how it sounds. There are silent consonants at the end of words, nasal vowels your mouth hasn't made before, and liaison, where the end of one word runs into the start of the next. Listening is harder than Spanish, and so is spelling. Verbs are irregular in more places than Spanish, and the subjunctive shows up often enough that you'll need to be fluent with it near the top.

There's a long-running sense that French is just harder, which pre-2024 was probably true at the grading level. Ofqual's adjustment has mostly closed that gap, but you'll still hear the "French is harder" line from parents, teachers and older siblings. Take it with a pinch of salt now.

German is much smaller than the other two: roughly a quarter of French by entry size. You'll often find it concentrated in grammar schools, independent schools and strong comprehensives rather than everywhere.

In the published figures, German tends to show the highest grade 9 rate of the three. The temptation is to read that as "German is easier", but it's really a story about who's taking it. The students sitting German are, on average, a stronger academic group than those sitting French or Spanish. Pick German expecting that headline rate to carry you and you'd be joining that cohort, not changing it.

On what the language actually asks of you: spelling is phonetic once you learn the rules, which is a plus. There's a lot of everyday vocabulary that overlaps with English (Wasser is water, Haus is house, Finger is Finger). The challenge is grammar. Four cases that change the endings of articles, pronouns and adjectives. Word order that puts the verb at the end of subordinate clauses. Separable verbs. Compound nouns that look terrifying until you learn to break them into their parts.

German grammar is more work than Spanish or French, no way around that. But it's systematic. Once you understand the system, it stops feeling arbitrary, and some students find that easier than remembering lists of individual irregular forms.

The data differences between the three are now small enough that picking on the headline grade 9 rate alone would be a mistake. A handful of other things will swing your grade far more.

The one that matters most is your teacher. If you like the Spanish teacher at your school but not the French teacher, that will probably show up in your grade. Ask around before you commit, especially if you have older siblings or friends in Year 11 who've just finished.

Next up is whether you actually like it. You'll practise more in a language you enjoy, and over two years that compounds into real marks. Spending a weekend binging a Spanish Netflix show is revision when you do it enough. Hating every Thursday afternoon isn't.

Then there's what you've already done. If you had years of French in primary school, you've got a head start it would be a shame to throw away. If you've got a grandparent who speaks German or an auntie who grew up in Madrid, you'll pick up accent and intonation a lot faster than someone starting cold.

After all of that, your own learning style matters. If you like memorising vocabulary and drilling patterns, Spanish will suit you. If you're happy with trickier spelling and don't mind that French words don't sound how they look, French works. If you like systems and don't mind a steep climb at the start for a payoff later on, German is for you.

Students often ask what percentage you need for a grade 9 in Spanish, French or German specifically. There isn't really a clean answer. Boundaries shift every year with cohort performance, they're set differently by each board, and the reformed specifications have only had one year of boundaries so far.

The best thing to do is to look up your board's own boundary table for your spec and year rather than relying on a rule of thumb. Boards publish them on their results pages after each summer session. Our grade boundaries GCSE Edexcel 2025 guide walks through how boundaries get set and where to find them.