Okay, I'm a fluent speaker of American English, and I'm planning on learning one of the so-called 'Romance' languages: the choice comes down to Spanish (probably most practical here), French (AAAAAAAA), and Italian (interested me ever since I read Catch-22).
Relevant to my interests. I've been studying Chinese for a bit, and I think i'm going to try to learn two at once. I know I'm going to fail miserably, but there are few things i've wanted more than to do this. I studied Latin a bit before going to college, and I've narrowed it down to either french, italian, or portugese. I don't really care about exoticism, I get more than enough of that through Mandarin.
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Anonymous2007-07-14 4:01 ID:pDB83dk/
>>48
>french, italian, or portugese.
I'm a Portuguese speaker and I can tell you our grammar sucks, it's too complicated.
Go with French, it's slightly less complicated and slightly more useful.
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Anonymous2007-07-14 11:34 ID:3ymDWiCE
>>33
as a sanskrit learner i can confidently say fuck that noise
Any particular reason to choose French over Italian besides number of speakers? I've wasted four years of my life learning Latin, which of the two is closer? I'd assume Italian, but I'm often wrong about this sort of thing.
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Anonymous2007-07-14 16:23 ID:0Fvn9ver
Italian is closer to Latin than French is.
But French is a lot closer to English than Italian is.
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Anonymous2007-07-14 17:02 ID:O9g0NxpM
Hmm. I hate to ask this, but which is more commonly judged as "easier"?
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Anonymous2007-07-14 18:24 ID:0Fvn9ver
You should consider the cultural interest you might have in learning one language or the other.
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Anonymous2007-07-14 18:59 ID:O9g0NxpM
Well, my family's from Norway, so neither of those is really applicable. I guess the best thing to do would be to try and visit both those countries, but that's a bit tricky.
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Anonymous2007-07-14 19:58 ID:0Fvn9ver
It's not about family, but feelings about italian/french history/litterature/cinema/people/country/etc.
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Anonymous2007-07-14 20:10 ID:O9g0NxpM
Good point. I guess there's no right answer, hopefully the answer will be more and more obvious the more I research.
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Anonymous2007-07-14 22:45 ID:maWFntkG
Learn catalan. Its similar with french, italian and spanish.
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Anonymous2007-07-15 6:10 ID:V8wAsu0+
>>59
This is a good idea.
Learn some minor language that will give you another major language as bonus, then it will be much more rewarding!
For example, learn Galician and with a couple of tweaks you will know Portuguese. Or learn Romanian and with some effort, Italian will come to you.