Late Start to IB Ab Initio Spanish?

Many of my friends in IB took pre IB French 10 SL, did horribly and then took IB Intro Spanish 11 as their grade 11 language and they said it was dead easy. Spanish is quite an easy language to learn from what I understand (the grammar is quite straight forward). My friends absolutely sucked at French and did awesome in the Spanish cl. If you're willing to work hard to catch up, you should be fine. I wish I had taken Spanish instead of suffering through French 12 and squeaking by with a 4.