I’m planing on backpacking across Europe next year and I hate being the dipshit who only speaks one langue. I already have a small amount of german and spanish so those are the only two I’m interested in. I get the impression that outside of Spain spanish isn’t spoken much but I do plan on traveling south america at some point too so spanish is going to be needed eventually.
If we’re talking only Europe, I might actually say French, just because of how familiar Germans are with English. Most Europeans speak good English, but France is kind of an outlier there. In terms of overall usefulness, however, Spanish is hands down the more useful language to learn given how widely spoken it is in the world.
In (rural parts of) countries like Czechia and Poland there’s a lot of people that don’t speak English but do understand German.
Spanish will definitely net you some mileage out of the learning process