Disclaimer: full fluency, no studying required, but knowledge of the written language is not included.
Seeing as I am already Italian I suppose I will pick Chinese.
Also I guess I’m going to be that guy. “La vida es bella” is not Italian, it’s Spanish lol.
God damn it lol
Living la vida loca
came here to point that out as well lol
That’s hilarious.
Could you choose Italian and become your countrys best linguist by objectively being twice as good at the language as any other native speaker? Or does it turn into Vulgar latin?
Chinese because Italian would be a lot easier to learn on my own.
Chooses Chinese:
- Monkey’s paw curls
- Congratulations, you learned the Min dialect of Chinese!
'3. You unlearned all other languages
Chinese. Not for any high-minded reason, just to have access to a whole new culture of music, TV, movies, etc.
Learning spoken Chinese without learning written Chinese is basically like only knowing half a language. Whereas learning spoken Italian and being familiar with the Roman alphabet would basically mean you could read it too, at least at a basic level. So much as I think it would be useful good to magically learn Chinese (which I am incidentally currently working on), the constraint of only being able to speak it tilts me in favour of Italian.
Chinese, preferably Cantonese, just because I wanna be able to visit my best friend in Hong Kong and get around without any sorta language barrier.
On the other hand Hong Kong has a lot of English mixed in due to tourism (and its history) so you won’t fare too bad even if you didnt know how to speak
Italian, so i could read The Name of the Rose in original
Excellent choice, I wonder if the original Italian would be even better!
God, Chinese is so much more useful. Italian is virtually useless, in fact. 59 million people live there, 1.4 billion live in China alone, not to mention the the emigrants.
I love my Italian homies, but yeah.
Eh, I actually want to visit Italy one day. I’ve never had the desire to go to China, and a lot of stories I’ve heard from people who did visit for tourism or business were not making me want to go.
I’ve been and thought it was splendid.
Doesn’t China have more than one spoken language, though? If I get all of them, Chinese. Otherwise Italian because then I’d have Spanish as well, I know toddler Spanish already and the grammar is the same.
I was being intentionally broad but yeah. Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, whatever the Weigers speak, and a bunch of regional dialects/languages. That’s my understanding at least, without googling it.
From what I was taught, most people in china primarily speak mandarin or can speak mandarin as well as another dialect. Mandarin is the one you want.
Italian is “La vita é bella”. This is Spanish. ಠᴗಠ
Italian would be nice but chinese might be more practical. I had to take five quarters of a foreign language in college, and someone suggested Farsi (Persian) saying it would be easy because it’s just learning a new alphabet. HA. It was hard as hell, the grammar rules never made sense to me, but I stuck it out for five quarters but barely remember any of it.
Probably Chinese (Mandarin). More people speak it so it would be more useful.
Chinese. Already know multiple Indo-European languages. Would be cool to know other language families, I only speak languages from two right now.
No written? Interesting.
If you want full fluency in both spoken and written, I think learning the adjacent written portion would be easier with Spanish, French, German. So I would pick Spanish or French. Both are very common in the world.
Manadarin would be neat, but without the writing I wonder how helpful it would be.
*Lol I missed the picture entirely. Between Italian and mandarin I’d take Mandarin because sorry I see no use for Italian at all,
Chinese. It’s a lot harder to learn since I know a ton of Spanish. It’s also one of the most widely spoken languages in the world
compared to not learning written Italian (like you 😜), not learning written Chinese seems kinda worthless. ofc that’s an exaggeration but the written part is the hardest part!! and the best part
Would knowing the spoken language make learning the written side easier? Or does it likely depend on the language?
depends on the orthography. I find Chinese much harder to read than Italian. part of that is because of me, and part of that is because of how their writing systems are designed.
so I think you’d be getting a better “deal” out of Chinese if you could magically learn the writing too. but without that, well… students pour thousands of hours into learning them, and I’ll still have to do that too
Italian i can just bibbity bop my way to the future, hello see ya later
