Italian - Spanish

scruff321

Just curious are they VERY similar or to what degree are they similar? I was thinking in the future i would like to learn either Portuguese or Italian...

scruff321

almost 100 views and no one arsed responding cheers!

spdmrphy

Alright then, here's my tuppence worth.

As a student of italian, I can read spanish quite easily - not understanding everything by any stretch of the imagination, but there is a huge overlap of the vocabulary and it's not hard to get the gist of most of it. Spoken spanish is a different story for me, I could understand maybe 30-50 percent of a conversation with a spanish speaker, and much less of radio / tv in spanish.


My girlfriend is Italian, and can understand spoken spanish pretty well, around 70% comprehension she says.

So, there are many similarities, but at the end of the day, they're two different languages, and there are probably even more differences.

Learn Italian though... it's cooler.

Enkidu

scruff321 wrote: »

Just curious are they VERY similar or to what degree are they similar? I was thinking in the future i would like to learn either Portuguese or Italian...

If you have already learnt Spanish, Italian will be a much easier language to learn than any other language you could go for. It's the most similar to Spanish, more than Catalan, French, e.t.c.

scruff321

Thanks for the responses

santosubito

I picked up Spanish quite quickly having studied Italian and French. I can read and speak it well enoughm having just gone to Spain repeatedly over the years and reading the web, no classes necessary. But I can't say was it the influence of the Italian, or the French - or both.

Dun

I studied French and Spanish to degree level, and found Italian very easy to pick up. It is quite similar to both, and especially as regards Spanish, you can guess what the Italian word is going to be a lot of the time. Just one thing about your choice of Italian or Portuguese (presumably because you know Spanish already), while Portuguese is close to Spanish in a lot of ways, the pronunciation of Italian is a lot easier in my opinion.

The Corinthian

Belated answer and different perspective.

As with any other language, I would first ask myself what you want it for. If it's purely an academic interest, then well and good, however if you want some practical utility from it you need to consider where the language is spoken.

Italian is spoken in Italy and two of the southern cantons of Switzerland. Beyond that, it's a second or common enough language in a number of places around the World, such as Eritrea, Libya, Malta and Somalia. Please note that while 'Italian' communities do exist around the World, historically their families migrated prior to the language being truly unified (presuming it is even today) and thus will tend to speak dialects rather than Italian (this is why Argentina speaks Spanish rather than Italian).

Portuguese is spoken in Portugal and, more importantly, Brazil. Beyond that, it's found in a number of places around the World, such as Macau, Mozambique and East Timor.

So, in practical terms, if you're likely to remain in Europe, learn Italian. South America, learn Portuguese (although Italian has more 'snob' value there).