Spanish VS Italian: Which is Harder?

[@marcello7781]

Judging by what foreign students learning both languages tell me, I'm glad that Italian and Spanish were my two native languages, though I think Italian is the hardest of the two.

[@MrAllmightyCornholioz]

Do you speak Rioplatense Spanish? If not, can you understand it with 100% intelligibility? Also, do you eat spaghetti tacos?

[@cahallo5964]

​@@MrAllmightyCornholioz Rioplatense Spanish is not a different language, it's perfectly intelligible, excepting some idiomatic stuff like it happens everywhere.

[@yrooxrksvi7142]

Italian has definetely the harder grammar, especially verb conjugations.

[@philswiftreligioussect9619]

@@MrAllmightyCornholioz XDDDDDDDDD che boludo

[@philswiftreligioussect9619]

@@cahallo5964 Why do people classify the varieties of Spanish by regions? I speak the quote on quote "Andean" variety from Bogotá, but we sound so different from how someone from Medellín or Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru would sound like. We all understand each other, but when we get to the cultural and slang side of things we literally cannot understand each other.

[@Giannnnnnnnnnnnn]

7:30 As a native Italian speaker (I'm from Rome), I'm pretty sure that "Il televisore" is used to refer to the device itself while "la televisione" is used to refer to the programs broadcast on it

[@luigibolognesi9559]

Sì è come hai spiegato tu 😊

[@chriswilson1853]

Is this regional? Many years ago I went to Italy with my Italian grandmother and she told me it was la televisione, but one of the locals I made friends with corrected me and said it's "television." She pronounced it the same as televisione just without the "e" sound at the end.

[@Giannnnnnnnnnnnn]

@@chriswilson1853 In Italian we always pronounce every character of every word. I know some people in the north are used to cut the last vocal but I don’t know well how it works because it is something regional. In general it is “televisore” o “televisione”.

[@MTLMedia]

Same in Spanish. I have always referred to the object as "el televisor" and to "la televisión" as the medium. Though colloquially people will frequently use "La tele" to refer to both. So it makes sense that it would be similar in Italian.

[@rafaelalbertotorrescuenca7189]

En español usamos "EL televisor" (masculino) para el aparato y "LA televisión" (femenino) para el contenido.

[@mimisor66]

As a Romanian that speaks Italian but also has a limited knowledge of Spanish, I managed quite well to make myself understood as a tourist in Spain speaking a mixture of Spanish and Italian. Both languages seem very similar to me. Even in Portugal I managed to get along by using some basic Italian.

[@wcgcapone]

I speak Spanish and French and I can get the gist of spoken Romanian. I find Romanian to be closer to Spanish than either French or Italian.

[@fixer1140]

As a spanish native speaker I can tell you that you can go by with Italian quite easily, as long as you speak it slowly. That's one of the beauties between both languages, we can understand each other for the most part.

[@tahiti1]

The second of the two that you learn is the hardest, when the two languages are similiar. I learnt Italian first and went to university in Italy. Learning Spanish and living in Latin America, I constantly get confused with Italian

[@mimisor66]

@@tahiti1 my Italian teacher used to tell us that for us Romance speakers, we at first learn Italian very fast, but at a certain moment we start to make confusions between languages due to similarity.

[@elvisbustos2585]

I honestly like Romanian the most out of all the romance language, sounds cool and I speak Spanish, although it doesn't quite make sense to me when listening, but I can understand a little bit

[@victoraguirre5545]

Actually in Spanish also exists the doublet "el televisor" and "la televisión", which refering to the device is more a matter of local dialect (I would say that at least in Latin America "televisión" is more common), but the broadcasting per se is always refered as "la televisión". Also, it can be shortened colloquially as "la tele", but I've never heard "el tele". And the article thing before names is made in colloquial Spanish all the time, it's just the formal "rules" that prescribe against it. As a native Spanish-speaker and with my modest knowledge of Italian (I mean, I can read it perfectly and somewhat understand it when I hear it, but not speaking it at all), I would say that grammatically Italian is objectively harder than Spanish -but, as you say, not so much harder- because it retains a pair of features lost in modern Spanish (although sometimes still present in Early Modern Spanish: the alternation of "essere" and "avere" as auxiliaries for the past tense, for example, or the gender concordance with the participle: Italian "ti ha chiamato/chiamata, vs Spanish "me ha llamado" regardless of gender. Italian "egli é partito" & "ella é partita" vs Spanish "él/ella ha partido"). But I would say that Spanish should be harder vocabulary-wise, if only because of the wider distribution (I mean, for example, you know the standard word for "popcorn", wich is "palomitas de maíz" but you may never call it like that, you call it by the local name while being somewhat aware that in other places it is called different: "rosetas", "pochoclo", "crispetas", etc.). In general, I agree with you. Excellent video as always. (not excellent because I agree, tho, hahaha.)

[@jtinalexandria]

Yes, "el televisor" is quite common in Spanish to say "the television set". But it may be slightly old fashioned to say nowadays.

[@TheUVXR]

En México he escuchado 'el tele de torax' para designar 'la radiografía de torax'.

[@stefanomartello3786]

In italian we also shorten "la televisione" with "la tv" (pron: tivú) sometimes and it's always feminine.

[@anta3612]

Actually it's similar in Italian. La televisione refers to broadcasting but is also used to refer to the device through which the broadcasting is transmitted (as in the television set). However, il televisore refers only to the device. We also abbreviate it to "la tele" or la tv. I've never heard "il tele" but I have heard il tv (not as common) but only when referring to the television set (the device and not the broadcast).

[@Matlalcueitl]

Pretty the same in polish. We have "telewizor" (m.) - the device and "telewizja" (f.) - broadcasting service. Sometimes people use the word for device to describe the broadcasting service but that's extremely rare.

[@alejandror.planas9802]

As a native spanish speaker I use both "el televisor" and "la televisión", but they don't mean exactly the same. Televisor is the device, whereas televisión is both the device and the broadcasting So I could say "prende/enciende (turn on) el televisor para ver (to see) la televisión". But I could also say "prende (turn on) la televisión".

[@tomasmercado7577]

Me ganó, compadre. Aunque aquí la versión femenina para referirse al dispositivo siempre es acortada "la tele"

[@theguyfromsaturn]

I think it might be the same distinction in Italian. It is definitely also in French beween "télévision" and "téléviseur".

[@alejandror.planas9802]

@@theguyfromsaturn In Catalan it is too, so it must be a generalized thing in all romance languages

[@mihainita5325]

Confirm it's the same in Romanian

[@riukrobu]

Yes, in Italian "televisione" is the transmission, the images you watch on TV, and "televisore" is the device. Raf got confused for a second, happens to the best. I suspect that "el televisor" in Spanish, is only the device like it is for us, in Italian. The misunderstanding might be about "guardare la televisione" nobody watches "il televisore" it would mean you are watching the device, not the images, so most people almost never even hear "il televisore" because if you mention it it's because you were actually watching TV "la televisione". But if you were to buy a "televisione" instead of a "televisore", I'd think you're buying a TV network or something.

[@jdnw85]

Mexican here, 15 years ago I went to bar in Rome. After a couple of beers I had a conversation with some italians. Alcohol helps in mutually inteligibility

[@Glossologia]

As a native English speaker having learned both Italian and Spanish to a high level, I'd say Spanish is a bit harder for English speakers. A few reasons: -Lexically, Italian shares a bit (really only a bit) more vocab with English, simply because most romance vocab borrowed into English is from French, and French and Italian are lexically closer than French and Spanish. There also seems to be more words and expressions that can be translated literally between English and Italian than between English and Spanish (e.g. 'to become'). -In Italian, you can get away with not using the passato remoto in speech. In Spanish you really need to be able to actively produce the preterite (equivalent forms to Italian passato remoto), the perfect (equivalent to passato prossimo) and the imperfect (same as Italian). -The subjunctive in Italian should be learned if you want to speak in a standard way, but it's mostly superfluous and you can communicate without it. It's basically just an extra set of forms that need to be used in a fairly straightforward way in some contexts. In Spanish you cannot communicate fully without the subjunctive. For instance, at one point I, intending the phrase "Let me know when you do it", said to a Spaniard "dime cuando lo haces" which in reality means "tell me when it is that you do it", as opposed to "dime cuando lo hagas" which communicates the intended meaning. Spanish also doesn't merge the 3rd person plural subjunctive with the indicative like Italiam meaning you have to distinguish "decimos" (we say) from "digamos" (let's say). It also uses the subjunctive for the negative imperative, while Italian just uses the infinitive. Obviously you can point to things that are harder about Italian... the passato prossimo is a little more annoying to form than the Spanish perfect with two auxiliary verbs and more irregular participles... but there are also other things I didn't mention above in Spanish, like stressed/unstressed vowel deformations.

[@jtinalexandria]

I would say Italian is about 20% harder than Spanish, mainly because of pronouns like "ci", for which there's no direct equivalent in Spanish, and exceptions to direct articles like lo, l', gli, etc. and contractions like "ai", and strange words like glieli which are hard to figure out how use. More variants mean more rules.

[@Glossologia]

@@jtinalexandria Honestly, I think those little things have a much smaller impact than the other stuff I mentioned, but that's just my experience learning both languages :-)

[@smeegy1]

Interesting. I spoke English and French before learning Spanish so my reaction to the beginning of your post was that you were so wrong, but then I remembered I spoke French, lol. The concept of multiple conjugations was already extremely normal for me so I found Spanish to be almost so easy I'd call it baby's first language. Really the hardest part for me by far was the strict vowel pronunciation and how my English ears could SWEAR that the same speaker would alternate their vowel sounds, but they really don't. An excellent song to showcase this is "efectos vocales" by Nach.

[@Glossologia]

@@smeegy1 Have you studied Italian? Because the grammar of French and Italian is *extremely* similar.

[@smeegy1]

@@Glossologia not at all, though I do know the lexical similarity is like 85 percent or something crazy.

[@iberius9937]

Perfect timing for this upload, as I'm currently learning (more) Italian by way of Spanish, a method called "triangulation", where you learn a third or fourth or even fifth language by using another one related to it.

[@n._scents]

Being French, Italian is much easier, they're almost two similar languages w Spanish is slightly different and harder

[@albertwayne2323]

As a Spanish native speaker from Spain, I need to clraify the televisión example. In Spain we also have two words, sometimes they're used with both meanings but in reality they're slightly different. Let me explain. Televisión is feminine (La televisión) but it means mostly the "industry" of TV, one phrase we use a joke when in a TV programme is "mira mamá, salgo en la tele" (watch me mom, I'm on TV). But we also have "El televisor" which is masculine and it's not used frequently. Televisor means only the hardware, the machine, the physical screen. So when you're going to buy a new TV screen you say "Voy a comprarme un televisor nuevo" (I'm going to buy a new TV). In reality, we use the short term and say "Voy a comprarme una tele nueva", "tele" is the short term for televisor, but also we use it as short term for televisión like saying "Voy a ver la tele" (I'm going to watch TV). So in the end we have televisión y televisor, the first is the industry of television as a whole, the second one is the machine itself; and the first one is feminine and the second one masculine.

[@davidtice4972]

Spanish and Italian are 82% similar. I speak both Spanish and Italian. Sometimes I listen to Italian and have to stop and think am I listening to Spanish or Italian.

[@Uteuschmidth]

As a French speaker, I think that Italian words are easier and closer to recognize than Spanish words Even these three languages are based on Latin, the spanish words require me to think to an usual word which has the same root latin word

[@erichamilton3373]

One thing easier about Italian is its clearer crisper pronunciation. Spanish on the other han can sound a bit slurred and as if the mouth was full of cotton balls, which requires more concentration when listening (back when I was learning it).

[@aniE1869]

For me spanish would be easier because I could walk down the street and find at least 10 people whose first language is spanish that I could practice speaking with. It gets really fun when I go to a family reunion on my husband's side and there's at least 4 different forms of spanish spoken.

[@huguesdepayens807]

Damn dude that's rough. I'm sorry you have to deal with that.

[@ceciliarivera197]

There aren't four different forms of spanish. Spanish is only one language. When speaking it, people use different words that mean the same and also use different accents according to the region they live.

[@aniE1869]

@ceciliarivera197 that does make it different. I consider English spoken in England, the US, Australia, and India different forms of English. It's all the same language but with different accents and words used that make it difficult sometimes to understand each other even when technically using the same language.

[@MrSanchezgil]

Let’s no confused Castilian Spanish vs. American spanish

[@arkaitzetxeandia7542]

@@MrSanchezgil "Let’s no confused British English vs. American English". To my understanding that doesn't make sense... it's the same language. Or maybe English and Americans don't understand each other? And Spanish and Latin American either?

[@danielmoreno3083]

I understand that the video is most likely intended for non-native/non-fluent speakers of either Italian or Spanish, but I was still hoping for a more formal exploration of grammar and phonology differences. That would definitely be a future video idea that I'd root for. I'd like to share my thoughts about Italian as a native Spanish speaker. As it is widely known, it is so natural to pick up Italian, that that itself becomes the greatest difficulty; in other words: unlearning what is soo deeply rooted in your Spanish-speaking mind when it's different in Italian. That is, of course, a very broad and all-pervading feature, and something that can definitely be overcome with a conscious and focused effort. You just gotta take Italian seriously if you wanna master it. On a more technical approach, I think that the miscellanous differences (vocabulary, gender, additional articles) are almost trivial and something you just really have to memorize. Regarding grammar, I was able to find a 1 to 1 correspondence between Spanish and Italian grammar almost every time. Even in the most fine-grained aspects, like the usage of subjuntivo/congiuntivo, I still found it comparable and natural-enough (although both languages are full of different exceptions). If I have to pick one feature that I think is objectively harder in Italian, it would be the usage of particles like "ne" and "ci". We have a similar usage with the parcile "se" in Spanish (for wich Italian has an equivalent), but the usage of the other particles never came to me as naturally, and was something that had to be learned mostly case by case. Thanks for the great video and I'd love to keep having this type of language topics.

[@Whatever94-i4u]

I'd also wager that the "avere/essere" distinction in the perfect tenses is also a significant difficulty compared to Spanish which only uses "haber" in these cases.

[@Kinotaurus]

@@Whatever94-i4u Not a huge difficulty. Essere for verbs of motion and reflexive verbs, avere in all other cases.

[@Whatever94-i4u]

@@Kinotaurus In theory, it's not so difficult, but in real time it'll slip up the learner.

[@Default_Claudette_Morrel]

agreed. I wonder how odd it sounds for Spanish speakers to say IL mio libro or la mia bicicletta when mio and Mia is more like mine and then with the IL and La at the beginning.

[@Phil-od9ve]

As a native French speaker, I found Italian more difficult than Spanish, which was not obvious because listening or reading Italian, you tend to understand and "recognize" whole words and phrases, so you naively believe it will be easier the other way around😇 . But when you want to really speak, then Italian syntax requires a lot of agility and some thinking, even after some time🤔. Spanish is more "regular". Both languages are wonderful anyway, each with its own genius, worth any effort and give you access to extraordinary cultures ❤ Thanks for the video !

[@tuluppampam]

Ah yes, Italian syntax, that thing that changes depending on really subtle differences in meaning Italian has a way too free word order for a language with relatively little marking

[@AHPSC]

Spanish has two word for Television: La televisión, el televisor. As in Italian, the first one is widely used, the second one is rarely used, but nobody will care if you used either.

[@maryloudascoli]

Spanish is easier to speak. Italian is easier to understand spoken.

[@Pesso86]

I’m native italian and fluent in spanish. I don’t think italian is harder. Some things are easier, others are more complex, but all in all, I believe it to be more or less a tie

[@steliostoulis1875]

Just discovered your second channel. Really excited about it. Please keep up the good work, we love you

[@ZadenZane]

At absolute beginner's level Italian is harder. The accent is probably harder too. When I tried to talk Italian I kept getting told I had a Spanish accent. I come from London! You make a good point about vulgar Latin. Saying nobody spoke classical Latin because it's so complicated is like saying nobody speaks Russian because it's so complicated. Yes it is and they do.

[@fabiana.4640]

As a spanish speaker I think Italian is a bit harder for many reasons: - Spanish has more regional variations. For example: If somebody says "el sartén" it is not wrong even if I always say "la sartén", because in many regions this noun can be masculine.The same with many expresions, a Cuban would say: Cómo tú estás? I would say: Cómo estás?. Both are right. In Italian you do not have that tolerance. - The contractions in Italian. The stressed syllable in Italian if it is not a word you know. Spanish is more straightforward. You never have these problems. - The fact that if you read literature from the XIX century (no need to go back further) in Italian you find many words that are no longer used. E.g.: Manzoni uses the word "uscio" plenty of times. But nowadays, unless you are in Tuscany, most Italians do not use that word any more, they say "porta". In Spanish you have to go further back in time to find so many archaisms in written language.

[@gabrielinostroza4989]

Without having even started the video i'll go out on a limb and say Italian merely because it's El/La, Los/Las for Spanish against Il/L'/La, I/Gli/Le for Italian, lets see how it stacks up

[@gussetma1945]

For an English speaker Spanish is easiest, Italian is just a bit harder. When I was deployed to Italy, I already spoke Spanish reasonably well. After a week or two I was getting along OK in Italian.

[@increiblepelotudo]

I'm a native Spanish (Argentina) and English (USA) speaker, and I've tried speaking Italian, it's a weird mental rewiring - to me, hearing Italian sounds like a strange, stammered version of Spanish. You have to move word placements, and that is something that is difficult. Now, that being said, if I moved to Italy, I would most likely be speaking Italian to a pretty high level in a year. It's all about immersion.

[@Default_Claudette_Morrel]

Mental re-rewiring indeed. I’m not native of either Spanish or Italian but one you’ve learned one and solidified it , you have to unlearn some and make it make sense in the other language.

[@GarfieldRex]

Colombian here. Traveled to Italy, intelligibility is big, speed is not as important as having a knowledge in synonyms, although you'd obviously prefer a person to not speak fast. Educational level truly does not matter, communication is easy, only need to find the correct synonym to understand any sentence. And even if a word has no equivalent, we both cultures speak with our hands xd vorrei ritornare a Italia 💙

[@prince_cyprus]

I am an Italian that misses and loves Colombia and the paisa accent. Italy and Colombia forever

[@Antonio_Serdar]

I would say it is much easier for Italians to understand Spanish than vice versa.

[@philswiftreligioussect9619]

Qhubo pana. La verdad creo que los italianos están pero a otro nivel incluso comparandose a nosotros xD.

[@troiscarottes]

@@philswiftreligioussect9619 ¿Qué quieres decir con " están a otro nivel"?

[@philswiftreligioussect9619]

@@troiscarottes Los italianos tienen su propio lenguaje de señas xD. Osea yo que soy rolo y todo y admito que los italianos usan las manos pa comunicarse mucho más q nosotros.

[@donpowers8726]

My niece, a native English speaker, moved to Barcelona . There she learned both Spanish and Catalan. Took a trip to Italy. She has little problem communicating. If you can communicate, the languages are for practical purposes the same.

[@Trecesolotienesdos]

I've never understood this harder or easier thing. Learning is always relative. Some people have a bigger knack of picking up languages than others. Languages that are related might be easier to learn, such as Spanish, Portuguese and French. I don't think it can exist as absolutes.

[@emanuelamattioli6743]

French is more distant compared to Italian, my language, and Spanish.Once you 've learned both of them you can learn Portuguese which is very similar to Spanish.

[@Default_Claudette_Morrel]

I believe that it’s more or less for those watching that have a similar background. Say if I was to make a video about is Spanish or Italian was harder to learn- my target audience would be English speakers right? Right. But in this comparison it wouldn’t really matter as it’s comparing Spanish va Italian which are both Romance languages with or without taking into account one’s native language so it would pretty much be about the same

[@stefanomartello3786]

It depends a lot on wich language you start from and to what degree you want to be fluent

[@halfthefiber]

As an American, living in the USA, who is learning both, Italian is subjectively harder. I get to use what I learned in Spanish practically every day, just by going about my daily activities. If I want to practice Italian, I have to visit Italy or Switzerland, or seek out speakers to converse with.

[@La-meiga-celtibera]

In Spanish we rarely use “El televisor” as well. But like in Italian, we use the feminine the most.

[@MTLMedia]

It's very interesting as a native speaker of Spanish (I also speak English and French fluently) I can understand 90% of Italian and Portuguese. French helps me in understand the words that are different in Italian that are different from Spanish (Comer -Manger -Mangiare). We too have different gendered variations on Television. We can say "la Televisión" to mean the actual object, but also the broader concept of "Television". We can also say "el Televisor" which sounds more antiquated but refers to the Object only. Colloquially "La tele" is used throughout the Spanish speaking world. There is also a phenomenon where we use articles before names "la Marcia, el Pablo, la Justina" which is common in my country to do, but considered poor grammar. As for speed of speaking, that is where I disagree with you - Spanish is know for having the worlds fastest speakers, to the degree that as a native speaker if I speak to certain speakers from other places I find it difficult to understand exactly what they are saying, largely because of speed. When we meet people outside of our own accents and dialects it is considered good form to speak slower than you would normally. Cheers! Great video

[@heikozysk233]

I had English, French and Spanish in school/ high school and started with Italian only recently. My pet peeve (compared with Spanish) are indeed the articles and the plural in Italian. As learning articles and singular/plural are usually at the very beginning of learning a new language, I can imagine that this makes Italian look harder to learn. German is my first language and I find Spanish more phonetic, easier to understand to the extent that, when spoken at moderate speed in Castilian without much of an accent, I can understand every single word even if I have no clue what that word means. That does not work that well in Italian, and does not work at all in French LOL

[@onlyoneamong300]

French pronunciation is complex and pretty nasal, which makes it a bit harder!

[@lorenzogiannini88]

About the use of the words “televisore” vs “televisione” at the beginning of the video I think there might be a difference in their meaning, at least originally. I believe “televisione” referred to the immaterial telecommunication medium while “televisore” was the actual television receiver or TV set. Maybe with time the word “televisione” extended its meaning to both concepts and is the most used today. Also the second website you showed has a horrible spelling mistake (at least I was taught so in my school days) with the elision of the article “gli”. But I did see it around a few times in newspaper articles and such so I wonder if the rules have changed. Love your content. Ciao

[@CRESCOCHANNEL]

No. gl' non si può proprio vedere. Non è cambiata la regola. Può essere che venisse usato nel 1800, ma oggi nessun italiano oserebbe elidere l'articolo gli.

[@Tusiriakest]

The thing about speaking slowly applies better to portuguese, sense the phonetic is so different from Spanish or Italian.

[@alfonsbarba8204]

As Catalan and Spanish native speaker (and with very close Italian friends since my childhood), I think Italian is harder than Spanish just for the number fonems used. A native spanish without training is unable to pronounce correctly "pranzo".

[@PhantomKING113]

6:45 I'm... surprised noöne has mentioned this in the comments yet xd, but in Spanish we also have both "la televisión" and "el televisor", so there's that. As for the "no matter how fast they speak, if I know the word I can understand it": be kind to him, he hadn't done the video yet, he didn't know how Spanish streamers speak.

[@Glownyszef]

Interesting, in Polish we also have two words associated with television that are almost identical to Italian: feminine "telewizja" and masculine "telewizor" (w is IPA /v/ and j is IPA /j/). But here they are not interchangeable, they're semantically distinct: "telewizja" is used to refer to the abstract concept of television and "telewizor" is used to refer to the device. So for example our public TV is called "Telewizja Polska" - "The Polish Television", but you go out to buy a new "telewizor".

[@dlevi67]

"Isvizzera" and "isbaglio" as euphonic forms of 'Svizzera' and 'sbaglio' do exist, but are archaic. Totally correct that no-one speaks like that today.

[@paull6449]

Similarly in French : la télévision vs le téléviseur. Specifically, le téléviseur is the machine or box that you watch whereas la télévision includes the whole concept including programming. I imagine it's the same in Italian?

[@joseantoniocastro1486]

El televisor (masculine) and la televisión (femenine), same duality in spanish. I don´t speak italian, but as an spanish I can undertand italian pretty well and when I visit Italy I never have any communicaton issue, speaking spanish and listening to italian.

[@FrancescoRossi-q4s]

¡Muy bien! Very interesting as usual Metatron. Another point where Italian is slightly more difficult than Spanish is the tonic accent in writing. Italian indicates the tonic accent on the last syllable, as in Perù, cf. Spanish Perú, but not in Bergamo (Bérgamo) or Cordova (Córdoba). Here in the province of Bergamo, there are places with names like Sorisole, Ambivere and Longuelo. How are they pronounced? Sorísole, Ambívere, Lónguelo.

[@Deibi078]

In Spanish the television is also male and female, "la television" and "el televisor"

[@kirstenmuller4536]

Yes, but there's a rule about when to use which. The masculine version refers to the physical/actually TV set/box itself. The feminine version refers more to what you watch on it. So "Miro la televisión" but "Llevo el televisor". Hope this helps.

[@kirstenmuller4536]

As a side note, I don't know if a similar things occurs in Italian, or if they're completely interchangeable.

[@Deibi078]

oh and also the computer, "la computadora", "el computador"

[@kirstenmuller4536]

@@koontroll3364 Yep, pretty much! I just don't know if that same rule applies in Italian.

[@kirstenmuller4536]

@@Deibi078 I didn't know that one, actually! I just knew that Spaniards have a completely different word for computer.

[@notonlysunandbeach2567]

It's impossible to determine which language is more complicated, unless you're native to both. I've heard in different countries people and even language teachers saying that their language is more complicated than others, that they have a greater variety of synonyms and ways to express ideas, etc. I'm native speaker of Spanish and German. Of course, in both countries people believe their language is more complicated than the other. Fact is, they don't know the other language they are speaking about or maybe they just have a basic knowledge and judge based on it. What I can say is: both are complicated if you come from a completely different language tree. More or less you already explained it in this video: for German speakers it's relatively easy to learn English, but it would be a real challenge for an Italian to learn Russian. Btw, thanks for your nice video 👍🏻

[@johndeleon8741]

I pretty much doubt that any Spaniard would say that German is more complicated than Spanish.

[@swamilee_]

Grazie perché mi aiuti a migliorare l'inglese e l'italiano contemporaneamente!😂 Dovresti fare una serie per italiani che faticano con l'inglese o vogliono semplicemente migliorare. Complimenti per il canale che ho appena scoperto 🎉

[@ValentinaMartinini]

The “prothetic i” is a mostly obsolete phenomenon whereby an “i” is added to words beginning with “s”+consonant (or “gn”, in ancient Italian), when preceded by a word ending in a consonant. Examples include: in isposa, per ischerzo, in Isvizzera, etc. Nowadays it survives only in some crystallized expressions such as “per iscritto”. I have encountered this phenomenon several times in my readings, but I would hardly think it worth mentioning as a hindrance to learning Italian.

[@guillermorivas7819]

This is interesting. This would make it a phenomenon that all Romance languages went through like: escuela (spanish), ecole (french), escola (portuguese). Italian probbaly dropped it to feel/look closer to the original Latin language.

[@cobracommander8133]

I'm an native English speaker from the US, and for me Italian has been harder to learn. I took 4 semesters of it in College and really struggle with it. Meanwhile, I've been able to become fluent in Spanish on my own. I should note I also lived in Spain for 3 months where I was fully immersed, so that certainly helped. That's just my personal experience, and I haven't given up on Italian yet. Hopefully I'll be able to spend a few months in Italy some day and come back to the US fluent.

[@Default_Claudette_Morrel]

Italian is a bit harder than Spanish as there is “extra” stuff not present in Spanish.

[@VicāriusHispāniārum]

7:45 in fact, in Spanish we also have a masculine form: "el televisor" rather than "la televisión", but, just as in italian, it is hardly ever used.

[@guillermorivas7819]

Actually for us Spanish speakers, the slower the Italian speaker speaks Italian the better we understand. Podcast Italiano and Irene La Preziosa enunciate a very neutral/clear Italian compared to others I've listened to. I'm not sure if it's regional (or they are mixing a variant of Italian) or something.

[@anta3612]

Native speakers who teach their language to foreigners tend to be very mindful of how they speak and therefore control the speed, pronunciation (are very clear) and type of vocabulary they use in order to be understood by non native speakers. When speaking naturally, however, Italians (as people who speak any other language) tend to speak at a normal speed (some people naturally speak faster than others) which may still be too fast for a non native speaker, use a mix of standard language, regional language and dialect. People will change register depending on their audience. As Metatron said: in more formal situations standard language will tend to be used while in less formal situations people tend to mix standard language (with regional variances) and local dialect. The educational level of a person matters too. The more educated a person is the more mindful they tend to be when speaking with a non native speaker and are less likely to use regional Italian. Also older generations tend to speak more dialect than standard Italian (unless they are particularly educated).

[@frangeesk]

Podcast Italiano parla ad un ritmo talmente lento da essere innaturale. Dovessi venire in Italia scoprirai una realtà diametralmente opposta.

[@elchami743]

In Spanish the words TELEVISOR and TELEVISION refer to two DIFFERENT things! 💢💢

[@joseantonioperezalonso9967]

Italian is obviously more difficult than Spanish, because: 1.- The participle is never declined in Spanish, but sometimes in Italian. 2.- The past perfect tense and other compound tenses in Spanish are always formed only with the verb “haber”, not with the verb “haber” or “ser”. 3.- The plural in Spanish is much easier, as it only has one form: you add an (e)s and that's it. 4.- For a foreigner, it is always easy to know where a wird shall be entoned, because of the written accents. 5.- In Italian you often don't know if it is flat, or stressed on the antepenultimate syllabe, and there are a lot of words stressed on the syllable before the antepenultimate. And many verbs change the stressed syllable according to the tense in which they are conjugated! 6.- The difference between a/in in Italian is a big problem, which does not exist in Spanish. 7.- In Spanish there are no long and short vowels. - In Spanish, words such as "ci" or "ne" are not used. 8.- The Spanish articles (and their abbreviations) are simpler, as are the rules for the cases in which articles are or are not used. 9.- Hardly anyone speaks standard Italian in Italy, there are very strong regional accents! And yet... I love the Italian language because it is beauty and because it sounds lovely!

[@saffyteal2209]

Spanish might be slightly easier and spoken by so many people worldwide, but Italian is wayyyyyy nicer on the ears, in my opinion. I speak neither btw.

[@MrAllmightyCornholioz]

Which is better? Tacos or Spaghetti?

[@monalisadavinci7076]

🍝forever!

[@dustyhaas8061]

I don't know... spaghetti is great, but tacos are so much easier to make and do not require forks to eat.... of course where I live, tacos are going to be more common - so that also makes me lean toward tacos - ease of access and ease of eating...

[@Lacteagalaxia]

Tacos ; spaguetti? the best is PAELLA

[@monalisadavinci7076]

@@dustyhaas8061 I disagree--all you need is pasta and sauce and you have a wonderful meal in 10 minutes. And, the twirling of the fork turns any spaghetti like pasta, into a chill out slow food. I have the same experience eating artichokes--chill out.

[@monalisadavinci7076]

@@Lacteagalaxia I like paella too.

[@linamargaritalis]

Colombian here (native Spanish speaker). we have the same El televisor/La televisión as Italian, it seems. In Spanish El televisor refers to the machine, whereas La televisión revers to what is being televised.

in Spanish "el televisor" it is the device talking about of material object "la television" is when you are talking about related technology but people can exchange this last meaning for both subjects on common daily communication.

[@CasualLifeExperiencer]

I'm from Veneto, and there (Maybe in other parts of the region is different) we colloquially put the article before feminine Personal names but not masculine. We say :"Ho appena chiamato la Maria"(I've just called Maria), but :"Ho visto Marco in stazione"(I saw Marco at the station), and so we do with teachers at school

[@Unpainted_Huffhines]

I would guess Spanish is easier, just from what I know about pluralization in Italian. Spanish ultimately ends the word with an "s" (among some other conventions) like English, and other Romance languages.

[@silvermane5695]

You add an "s" when the word ends in a vowel; however if it ends in a consonant then you add "es" e.g. Tree=Arbol Trees=Arboles Flower=Flor Flowers=Flores City=Ciudad Cities=Ciudades. Furthermore if the word in "z" then you change the "z" for a "c" and add "es" e.g. Fish=Pez Fish=Peces Cross=Cruz Crosses=Cruces Nose=Nariz Noses=Narices.

[@Unpainted_Huffhines]

@@silvermane5695 Those plural words all still end in "s", just like English plural words (except for "man", "woman", "child", and "ox"). Italian uses different plural forms depending on the final vowel of the word, from what I've gathered. "Italiano"/"Italiani" etc.

[@silvermane5695]

@@Unpainted_Huffhines In Italian if the final letters ends with an "o" then the plural is changed to an "i' e.g. ragazzo-ragazzi, libro-libri. If ends with an "a" then the plural changes to an "e" e.g. ragazza-ragazze, casa-case and if the words ends with an "e" then it changes to an "i" fiore-fiori, pesce-pesci. There are some irregular plurals for example: dito-dita, arancia-arance, amico-amici, braccia-braccia-bracci.

[@bacicinvatteneaca]

@@silvermane5695 the irregularities you listed (except amico-amici which isn't an irregularity, there's just no rule on whether the e/i plurals trigger soft c/g or keep hard ch/gh) are ones where the plural happens to have a different gender than the singular (I'm guessing due to the messy collapsing of Latin neutral into Protoromance masculine and feminine based on sound and randomness). There's also irregularities where the gender remains the same across number but the vowel change isn't typical

[@silvermane5695]

@@bacicinvatteneaca First of all, go back to my original message and make sure you read it correctly because I never wrote "Irregularities"; I said "irregular plurals" which is something different. I am not going to get into the specifics of Italian grammar however I can suggest a good Italian grammar book which explains better the types of plural in the Italian language and yes those includes the "irregular plurals" which are very few and you can count those with your right hand.

[@flaviospadavecchia5126]

I would say that what makes Italian harder is mostly how there are many more irregular verbs or verbs that have some irregular forms (especially in the supine). All the other differences are not significantly harder. For example, the plural and articles in Italian are more difficult, but Spanish differentiates between ser/estar, and so on. Italian also has both the verb essere and avere for the past participle (sono andato, ho mangiato), while Spanish only uses haber (he ido, he comido). Honestly, I'm a bit baffled that you chose to make this video, given that you don't speak Spanish, but okay. By being very superficial, you didn't say anything wrong, to be fair.

[@4kporgservices39]

🤗 Awesome video! I am a teacher of English in Uruguay, but I also speak Portuguese and Italian. About the TV, at least in Uruguayan Spanish there's also "la televisión" (female, even newer generations "la tele" as in British English "telly"), and "el televisor" (older generations).

[@Dreju78]

Polish has 'telewizja' and 'telewizor' meaning television, a system for broadcasting video and a device sitting in your room respectively. First is feminine, the second is masculine.

[@bacicinvatteneaca]

Same in Italian and Spanish, except the word for the device is si rarely used in practice that Italians started using the feminine televisione for the device as well as the service.

[@Dreju78]

@@bacicinvatteneaca kinda same here too. The device word is pretty much used when buying or moving it about 🙂 Nobody watches 'the device' for example. It would sound like appreciating the design, not like watching news or something.

[@armandon2208]

Im Brazilian and Im impressed how yhe word television went through the same thing as in Italian. 95% of the country eill call it "televisão" but it used to be called "televisor". Just old people still say it that way, but we'd all understand anyway

[@armandon2208]

Not sure if the same thing happened in Portugal

[@iberius9937]

GRAZIE MILLE for clearing up the diglossia myth about Classical vs "vulgar" Latin. Luke Ranieri also gone at length about this.

[@davegl9305]

7:00 now that you mention it, it's exactly the same in spanish: la televisión, el televisor. But everybody says: la tele.

[@maryreilly5092]

My Mom's from Italy and I speak both languages. Objectively, Italian is harder. The double c's the g's the the shoo sounds take time to absorb. Spanish is more straightforward. I love BOTH languages and peoples.

[@oscarberolla9910]

In Spanish, many people also put articles in front of their first and last names, for example: "Mañana llega la Susana con su esposo", or "La Aguilera ya no canta como lo hacia antes", but I must admit that it is not seen as in a good tone. .

[@johndeleon8741]

Not really, speaking like that is considered quite vulgar. It's also used deliberately to refer to someone in a pejorative way.

[@giorgiodifrancesco4590]

"In Isvizzera, per isbaglio" sono soluzioni prostetiche che rispondono a regole fonetiche ottocentesche non più usate. Se cerchi nei libri dell'Ottocento, trovi queste due soluzioni spesso. Sopravvive nell'italiano contemporaneo solo più una formula cristallizzata, "per iscritto".

[@enricopiaia1253]

Finalmente la spiegazione corretta.

[@alo5301]

For me it is more difficult to understand written Italian than Spanish and French.

[@Hirpina81]

Just a note: "il televisore" means the device, machine, the screen, the real thing you look at; "la televisione" is most used because means the mean of communication and, sometimes, even the the device itself. I watch TV - Io guardo la televisione. I have got to repair my TV - Io devo riparare il mio televisore. In old-fashioned Italian we used this euphonic "i" added to some words, but it's out of use. For an example, once I found in "Cuore", the book by Edmondo De Amicis, the phrase: "In iscuola" - "At school". We all got the meaning, but in real Italian we say: "A scuola". This euphonic "i" does not exist anymore, while some other euphonic parts still do. But not this one.

[@per-andersmalmberg6248]

Here is a perspective from a non native speaker who learnt both Italian and Spanish as an adult: As I lived in Italy many years ago, had an Italian girlfriend at that time, made a substantial effort to learn Italian and became rather good at it, at least according to Italian colleagues and friends, I find the content of this video interesting, but the title a bit confusing. This was more about: "Why Italian is a complex language" (I agree) rather than its differences with Spanish. A couple of years later I spent a whole year in Madrid, had to pick up Castellano, then left Spain for Panama where I spent five years and found that their version of Spanish is very different from the one in Spain. Now, based on my humble experience one aspect that might be slightly harder in Spanish compared to Italian is the verbs, as they have conjunctions for the informal "tu" in both singular and plural (os) and also for the formal "usted"(lei) in both singular and plural (ustedes) on top of ellos(loro), nosotros(noi) and vosotros(voi). Yes I know that not all forms are used on a daily basis but it is nevertheless still used occasionally, and as I discovered when I moved to Panama, it also varies depending on in which Spanish speaking country you are.

[@dympulls]

I'm a native English speaker. I did my degree in Spanish. In fact, I didn't speak any Spanish until I started my degree at the age of 38. I did take first-year Italian, and while I loved it (just not as much as I loved Spanish), I did find it trickier. For example, to make nouns plural in Spanish, you add -s or -es depending on what the word ends in. In Italian, the plural is formed by changing a vowel to another vowel. That really confused me. I also found the past tense tricky, very similar to French (which never made sense to me). I also found the apostrophes difficult. Not impossible, just difficult to get. Both are beautiful languages.

[@BigSmallTravel]

Italian is much more difficult for English speakers. Firstly, the grammar is much more difficult. Also, being from the USA because we hear a lot of Spanish from the immigrants who reside in the USA especially from Mexico.

[@cristiancombei2563]

The difference is so slight that, objectively, they will each take about the same amount to learn to get to C1.

[@sdepountis]

I'm a Greek native speaker and fluent in English. I've had little experience in learning romance languages as I can probably hold a basic conversation in French. I have taken Spanish for a year, but I'm starting Italian in September because I was recently employed by an Italian company. Spanish pronunciation for Greeks, whether you believe it or not, is ridiculously easy, since we share the same phonetic inventory. However, I found that vocabulary in Spanish is harder because it has many words of Arabic origin, not shared with other romance languages. I expect vocabulary in Italian to be more common with French, however I presume it will be harder in grammar (maybe?). Wish me luck in my Italian learning journey :)

[@antoniotorcoli5740]

As Greek you will learn Italian very fast. Good luck! Καλή επιτυχία!

[@Philoglossos]

Spanish actually has very few words of Arabic origin beyond the ones commonly in use in most European languages.

[@Aaron-hr5bb]

I'm a native English speaker who started formally learning Spanish at 12 years old. It seemed easy and fun. My parents encouraged me because of the utility since we lived near the border with Mexico. At 30 I started German with tapes and a tutor so I could communicate while mountain climbing in Austria and Switzerland. Then at 33 I had to go to Brasil for work. What a shock! The first morning in the hotel when people passed me saying "bon gia" instead of "bom dia" was the first indication that my Portuguese language tapes were very wrong. Then they listen to "o hagio", not "o radio". But after a couple years I fell in love with Brazilian Portuguese. To me it is much more fun and free flowing than Spanish. I have a very good friend who is Swiss/Italian and while visiting her family in Apulia, I speak Brazilian Portuguese and her poorly educated 80 year old father speaks the local dialect and we carry on lengthy conversations for hours. While I can't speak Italian I can read it and generally understand it. For me spoken Italian is more similar to Brazilian Portuguese than than to my Mexican Spanish. Spanish was my first "foreign" language so it is difficult for me to judge the difficulty of learning it. But objectively among the Romance languages the one I have most difficulty with is French. The others are so much fun.

[@morgar88]

I totally agree with you about TV, as a concept and an apparatus! In Spanish we also refer to la televisión or la tele as a concept, saying things like "voy a ver la tele" and we use el televisor to refer just to the actual device, and it's much less common. I would use it to ask "¿y por qué no funciona este televisor que recién compramos?" I feel like we would usually just use feminine for every use though. Televisor isn't common, and it's somewhat too specific and old-ish. I would compare the feeling I get from hearing "televisor" to the one I get when someone says "TV set" in English. It's specifically the device, and saying it makes someone sound a bit old fashioned. "Why doesn't this TV set work? We just bought it!" All of this is from the perspective of an General American English and North American Spanish speaker. Is it similar in Italian?

[@Miguel-vc6eq]

In Spanish, we also have both words: "la televisión" (feminine) and "el televisor" (masculine). And as in Italian we usually tend to use more "televisión" than "televisor". Moreover, nine times out of ten, we say the short version "la tele" instead of "la televisión".

[@arceyes]

Find the right teacher, my ex girlfriend’s mother taught Italian to children and she had a lot of patience when trying to teach me.

[@seustaceRotterdam]

Also, I learned my Italian in Padova in the 90s. They would say “La Maria” “La Donatella” using the articles but exclusively for female names. When I used my street Italian from Veneto especially in the south they laughed at me 😂

[@abiagio1]

Ho sempre ritenuto che "televisore" si riferisse propriamente all'apparecchio, all'elettrodomestico, mentre "televisione" può anche riferirsi all'attività di broadcasting.

[@CRESCOCHANNEL]

Si, il "televisore" è l'apparecchio solamente. Invece, la "televisione" può indicare sia l'apparecchio che l'attività di trasmissione televisiva. Il televisore è semplicemente un pò meno in uso, ma se qualcuno chiama l'apparecchio "il televisore" va bene. Non è affatto un errore. E' un sinonimo di televisione intesa come apparecchio.

[@emanuelamattioli6743]

As a native Italian speaker and my second language is English,I considet Spanish very similar to Italian though grammar is not always the same.There are a lot of false friends that mean something in Italian but not in Spanish . The funniest words are burro that means butter in Italian and donkey in Spanish. Therefore if we Italians say El burro por favor in a Spanish restaurant everybody's gonna laugh at us' cause it's impossibile to order a donkey for meal

[@emanuelamattioli6743]

@CobraKaiNoMercyIn Italian pronto means both ready and hello when answering on the phone and salire in Italian means go up while salir means going out in Spanish.Therefore the Italian salire has nothing in common with the Spanish salir

[@PamelaContiGlass]

One of my favorite mascvuline/feminine examples in Italian is Tavolo/Tavola. There are others, but we switch between "Il Tavolo" and "La Tavola" without even thinking about it. "Alzati dal tavolo e apparecchia la tavola" is perfectly good Italian that means "get up from the table and set up the table". However, I made the first instance of "Tavolo" masculine and the second one feminine. I could have switched them and no one, absolutely no one, would have even noticed. There are many other examples, but I like using "table" because it is so quirky that even Italians don't realize the gender change.

[@Mode-Selektor]

So basically what you are saying 12:00 is that we don't really need to worry about how to pronounce the z because either form would be recognized by an Italian because different accents pronounce it differently. Yes?

[@pierreabbat6157]

To me, the main thing more difficult about Italian is pronouncing written Italian. There are homographs pronounced differently, such as "pesca", and it's not always clear which syllable has the accent. Another is that some verbs form the passé composé with "essere", as in French, whereas in Spanish, all verbs take "haber". The conditional is future+preterite, rather than future+imperfect as in both Spanish and French, but that's just different, not difficult.

[@diegone080]

We pronounce pesca🍑 and pesca🎣 the same

[@diegone080]

Bro don't care about those stupid grammar rules about accents, no italian follows those rules

[@AlessandroGrandi96]

About "isvizzera" and "isbaglio", I don't know if it's just a northern thing, but it exists, or at least existed: my grandparents (from Milan, but I think to remember that also my grandma from Turin did that) use this kind of euphonic I before s-starting words. They use "in isvizzera" and "per isbaglio", but also "in istrada" and "in iscuola" and other similar expressions, but it's definitely a very old people thing, maybe derived by dialect, I don't know, or something that was taught in school at their time (my grandad is from 1932), but I never heard anyone under 70 use this kind of of euphony. About national names instead, when it is a name it should be capitalized also for modern people (Italiani, Inglesi etc.), but not for adjectives. It's not a very respected rule, but it exists in theory

[@diegofiorenzani9546]

"in Isvizzera", "in Ispagna" or "in istrada" are actually used in Tuscany but mainly by old people speaking in a more "traditional" way. Maybe I 've heard "per i sbaglio" a few times but it's very rare and very dialectal

[@geboyulara]

I love these comparisons. As an Australian, Native English speaker, who has learned to speak Italian rather well, I find that when I hear someone speaking Spanish, it's a lot like an English speaker listening to a Scotsman, one who is completely pissed out of his mind,

[@alejandromut]

In Spanish we also have “la televisión” and “el televisor”. Both feminine and masculine. Exactly like Italian.

[@Liminal.Headspace]

Considering my native language is Romanian, they are both pretty easy to learn. There's already plenty of mutual understanding for Romanians. Spanish is probably the harder one considering it's grammar.

[@ilzambongo1401]

It's true. I consider Romanian harder than Italian because I see more things in common when you think of Romanian and Italian, there's a higher intelligibility among them. The same occurs when you compare Spanish and Portuguese, for us (Spanish speaker here) Portuguese and Italian are easier but I'm not saying Romanian is like learning Chinese. I find Romanian the most interesting romance language, the fact of being surrounded by Slavic languages and sorry if I might wrong but I guess there's also influence from Magyar and Turkish, am I right? La revedere!

[@alrisan71]

when you are inadvertently promoting Spanish learning over Italian...

[@ntmn8444]

I think Spanish is easier. If you don’t know Spanish and you try to speak it, you can make yourself understood. But the reverse is not true. I speak Spanish fluently, and while I understand Italians perfectly when they speak, they didn’t seem to understand me as much. 🤷‍♀️ “inglese per favore, non parlo spagnolo”.

[@nicholaswaldon9554]

Ive studied both, and I find the thought process of Italian to be easier over Spanish. That is, the way in which words are processed and thoughts are created seems more similar between Italian and English. Not sure if that makes sense but it’s what I’ve experienced

[@ungorlgorl]

Difficile da dire! Sono madrelingua spagnola (portoricana) e abitai in Italia per circa 8 anni. Mi affascina particolarmente la granularità di una lingua in termini di modulazione della voce, gesti, micro differenze linguistiche che possono esistere tra le lingue mutuamente intelligibili come le nostre. Per me, l'italiano è un pochino più difficile (naturalmente) per il "CI" e "NE" e perche' devo ricordarmi di modulare un po' la voce, aprire alcune vocali, soprattutto quando si aggiunge lo "schwa" alla fine delle parole che terminano con una consonante. (tipo: "bancomat-uh", "idem-uh", ecc). Nonostante questo, l'italiano mi ha fatto apprezzare la mia madrelingua. :) Grazie per il contenuto!

[@rc1982]

As a Brazilian Portuguese native speaker, learning Spanish is easy, barely an inconvenience.

[@franktaylor7978]

As an English speaker who has studied and can speak both reasonably well; neither Spanish or Italian is harder. A few things are harder in Italian and a few things are harder in Spanish. Prepositions are harder in Italian, for example. Spanish seems to rely on verb forms more and hence verbs can be more elaborate in Spanish. From an English perspective.

[@jameshumphreys9715]

I went to a Catholic school and we had Italian lessons, teacher just spoke in Italian which didn't help me, all I remember was 1 lesson because of my dyspraxia my dad wanted me to focus more on my English. Since leaving school, I've been on duolingo to learn Italian but not kept it up. When, I went on holiday to mallorca, I brought a Spanish and often read constantly when we were with in mallorca. Neither language, I would say i'm officially at A1 level. To me, I like to know a language works.

[@ceciliarivera197]

In Spanish we also say El televisor or la televisión. Prenda el televisor or está viendo la televisión.

[@Erixandros]

In Spanish, neither languages nor nacionalities are capitalized (at least they shouldn't be, according to the norm). And we also use (at least in Spain) articles with certain people, famous or unknown. As a native Spanish speaker who's learning Italian, I don't think there's a substantial difference in difficulty between the two. I mean, it's nothing compared to the difference between learning English and learning German. German grammar is crazy. Maybe Italian grammar is more complicated than Spanish's, but it seems on the easier side of the spectrum to me. French and Romanian I find way harder. Portuguese is easy for a Spanish/Galician native, so I can't compare.

[@aknightofislamicarabia5543]

"I'll give you a good example." Chad.

[@mattarmstrong8197]

At the same time, I recognize how difficult English could be to learn for someone who speaks another European language. We have a large vocabulary with a lot of redundancy, our pronunciation is largely governed by a large set of complicated rules. Our orthography is irregular and we use no diacritics, with pronunciation of written words being largely implied or assumed. It’s not friendly to outsiders trying to learn it in any way. I will say though that as an English speaker I do have a much easier time with Latin and Romance languages than I do with Slavic languages. I also find reading Welsh and Irish/Scots Gaelic to be very difficult because the orthographies and phonetic values are so divergent.

[@ewoudalliet1734]

Germanic and Romance languages have had a bigger influence on one another. Especially in the region along the language border. For Romance influence the elephant in the room would be Latin, which was used as the language of intellectuals and the Church throughout much of European history - especially the Middle Ages. Not all Slavic regions saw such use for Latin - Orthodox vs. Catholic - nor was this impact on Slavic languages so extensive (Christianized later on). Then there's the influence of French, which was for a long time very influential among the nobility and bourgeoisie due to its "prestige". Especially in the Early Modern and Modern periods. French arguably had a pretty big impact on Slavic languages too. And even during the industrial revolution a lot of terms - originally English - actually passed through French first before being adopted in some languages. Spanish - and Portuguese a bit as well - as they were pioneers in exploration. Some technological advancements in those fields as well as items from the new world passed through their languages first. Italian was quite influential during the later Middle Ages and slightly less so afterwards. The Renaissance is a major reason here. Italy was a centre for art (especially Firenze managed to make a name for itself) and in music you can very easily find terms with an Italian origin (e.g. crescendo). Also lots of trade passed through this region (obviously we think of Venice, Milan and Genoa). Many people might underestimate the extent to which Germanic languages have had an impact, actually. Though one could argue the effect on Slavic languages vs Romance languages is actually quite similar. First off, the Germanic invasions when the Western-Roman Empire fell left many regions under the control of a Germanic minority. Visigoths, Langobards, Franks etc. (also Vikings a little later on) all had some impact on the regional culture and language; in some places more than others. Most importantly here are the Franks. The language most closely related to Frankish is Old Dutch (High German would be if it hadn't undergone the High German consonant shift, making it significantly different from other West-Germanic languages at the time such as Old Dutch, Old Low German and Old English). Many French (or better, the langues d'oïl) words have Frankish/Old Dutch origins (list on Wikipedia); though the dominant "administrative" language in the Frankish Empire was still Latin (with some rare Germanic terms). This because the Church was pretty much the main institution that kept records. As such, quite a few Franks also Romanized (e.g. Walloons, Picards etc.). We're not done with Dutch yet; just like (northern and central) Italy the Netherlands were a centre for art as well as a major commercial hub (e.g. ports of Bruges, Antwerp and Amsterdam). Particularly during the 16-17th century the Low Countries were a hub of skill and knowledge. And one such thing the Dutch knew a lot about were ships and seafaring (you can even find Dutch (scientific and naval) terms in the Russian and Japanese languages). Next up is German. Germans loved to read books apparently (lots of them; but, well... printing press). The German language also got to play a central role in the Protestant Reformation. Though it'd mostly become an important language later on with the German Empire and 20th century scientists (and even today it seems to be doing quite well). Then there's English. English is an extreme example of what I'm trying to explain here. This due to the influence of Norman French - a Romance language with quite a bit of Germanic influence itself - on English. English has influenced the world over; though mostly more complex words were used (and those are actually usually of Romance origin). As for the writing of English; don't just blame the Norman influence. Another issue is the Great Vowel Shift and a mixture of different circumstances: presence of non-English; often Dutch and German printers - printing press, regional differences, relatively high literacy, lack of any language institution or attempts to standardize it etc. which led to people just "recognizing the word" rather than actually reading it letter by letter (since, well, natives or people who are fluent don't really do that anyway). Anyhow, Romance languages will evidently be easier for someone who speaks English quite well. English also is thus an excellent stepping stone from Romance --> Germanic or Germanic --> Romance. As said, this intermixture is greater along the language border; obviously. Also note the shared Celtic substrate in this region. And then there's one last important argument: the way Indo-European languages diverged. Germanic and Romance languages are on the same branch of Indo-European languages and diverged around 5500 years ago; Slavic languages diverged sooner.

[@mattarmstrong8197]

I've been working on building a Swadesh list the last several weeks to compare Indo-European languages of Europe- mostly modern languages, but a few extinct languages for the sake of comparison. Old English, Old Norse, Gothic, Latin, and Koine Greek. I have had some experience in the past with Old English and Old Norse, as well as having taken Latin in high school as my foreign language. There have been a number of challenges, but it's been fascinating and a lot of fun. One of the things that has surprised me most though is the degree of continuity between modern and Old English. An enormous percentage of the modern English vocabulary is derived directly from Old English. I'm finding very minimal input thus far from other languages. In fact, so far I've found about as many loanwords from Old Norse as from Latin or Romance languages. Then again, the nature of this project requires that I limit the kinds of words that I'm looking for to words that aren't likely to be loanwords. It's not surprising then that I'm finding the vocabulary I set out to find.

[@ewoudalliet1734]

@@mattarmstrong8197 Well, that's really interesting actually. Will you be publishing the list?

[@mattarmstrong8197]

@@ewoudalliet1734 No, I don't suppose. It's just a pet project, for fun.

[@skeptigal4626]

Italian grammar is definitely more difficult. I studied Spanish from Jr. High through University, so I speak it pretty fluently. I started studying Italian about 4 years ago, and although I’m good at languages, I’d say I’m still not at C1. Maybe B2+.

[@MikeEnx]

no estoy de acuerdo, pienso que la gramática de ambos es muy similar.