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French vs German for continental philosophy

 I'm currently a senior in high school and plan on majoring in philosophy next year, and after that would most likely pursue graduate studies in philosophy. I've already done a fair amount of self-study and, after taking a very broad look at the history of philosophy, have started to hone in on continental philosophy as my main interest (for the sake of argument, let's say Hegel onward (plus Spinoza), with a specific interest in Merleau-Ponty). To bolster this interest and to get a head-start on skills that will be useful for graduate studies, I'm thinking of trying to learn either French or German. Here are my main considerations and questions:

1.) **Reading primary sources.** For me this is sort of a wash--there's Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, etc., but there's also Ponty, Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Iragay, Deleuze, etc. (although I'm not as familiar with the later French philosophers, so it's harder for me to gauge my interest; they also sort of have a bad connotation of pretentious French naval-gazing and after reading *Simulacra and Simulation* I'm pretty weary of any poststructuralism/postmodernism...ok maybe German does have the slight edge, but David Abram really has made me fall in love with Ponty...)

2.) **Reading secondary sources**. This one I know almost nothing about, but I think it is the most important. Which language would give me the wider access to secondary commentary and contemporary continental literature? I suspect that a lot of continental research and scholarship never gets translated into English, so which language is more fundamental for academic/dissertation purposes? I know this somewhat depends on where in continental philosophy I decide to really hone in on, but maybe there is a general consensus on which is more useful, and more widely used, in this regard? Maybe another way of phrasing the question would be: For the purposes of research, which is more indispensable?

3.) **German vs French universities.** I know this is sort of getting outside of my original scope, but if I'm considering doing graduate studies in the continent (this seems fitting given my interest in *continental* philosophy), would I find one or the other more useful? or are they about equal?

4.) **Ease of self-study.** Ultimately, I'll probably have to learn both (plus maybe Attic Greek), but which one does it seem more realistic to try to tackle by myself. For background, I'm in AP Spanish and have a pretty good grasp of the language (I joke that I'm just a month's stay in Spain away from fluency), so I feel like I would basically already know French grammar, not to mention the cognates from Spanish, as well as the Latinate cognates that came into English through Norman French. On the other hand, English is a Germanic language, so maybe the same would hold true for it (although I've heard that everyday English is Germanic and academic/literary English is Latinate, i.e. French).

I'd really appreciate any advice you all could give and I'd be happy to provide any more detail you might want

*Vale*
gpt
I won't comment on primary sources as you've got plenty of time to decide, but learning another language is always good. Your idea about French is approximately correct, in that familiarity with any other Romance language will be a major advantage (though there's a big difference between basic grammar and literary writing). On the other hand,

>English is a Germanic language, so maybe the same would hold true for it

Not exactly. While German borders on English in some ways, it has very different grammatical rules (including three genders and some remarkably idiosyncratic conjugation).

In the end, studying either (or both) on your own will give you a leg up on academic language study later on, and developing new listening/pronunciation skills is a good idea even if you don't end up going further, so you can't really go wrong.