If you have italian friends on steam you can talk with them in English and answer them questions on italian language. Spanish and Italian aren't really different. I'm Italian, I've never studied spanish but I can understand many words of this language because they're just similar to italian.
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Why italian? I mean, learning a foreign language is never a waste of time but it´s not really an international language
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The only countries that just speak German are Germany and Austria (yeah Liechtenstein too but that's just like 40.000 people). Luxembourg and Switzerland also have French/Italian.
Their are less then 100 million native German speakers world wide and ~80 million of them are German.
Sure it's one of the bigger languages in Europe because Germany has a relative high population but their are even more Japanese native speakers than German native speakers and languages like English, Spanish and Portuguese are European origin but have more native speakers than German.
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Well, at least Germany is one of the strongest economy in the world and the economic powerhouse of the EU. Secondly German is spoken in Germany, Austria, and Liechtenstein and is one of the official languages of Switzerland, Luxembourg and Belgium. Italian is spoken just in italy, City of Vatican and San Marino and maybe in South America, but just because there are a lot Italian immigrants. And from a business point of view, Italy's economy is in dire straits and unemployment is at record levels.
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you may be surprised by the great quantity of people who are presently investing their spare time to learn italian just because they like it. it may be not so important a language business-wise, but yet it is beautiful and somewhat useful in some niches. what i want to say is that landing a job is important, but life is composed by many different things. for sure @OP, if you happen to live in madrid or barcelona or some capital city in south america, you may want to look for the "istituto italiano di cultura".
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Sure and as i said "learning a foreign language is never a waste of time" . If the op wants to learn italian for cultural enrichment, leisure or sentimental reasons..go for it! Italian is my mother tongue and even though i speak a few foreign languages, still remains my favourite. But that's it. I have had no jobs using Italian and based on our economic situation i probably won't find it within the near future (at least in Italy).
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True I didn't look at the economic view point. But if you look at how many native speakers a language has, German has not that man or at least there are other European languages that are at least as relevant or even more relevant than German.
But yeah, never thought about it economically.
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As far as population of native speakers is concerned, everyone should learn Mandarin Chinese, period.
I am Chinese but speak primarily Cantonese. And I am studying German as a hobby as it is relatively easier than many other languages, say, Russian.
Basically, the only international language nowadays is English. So if one wants to learn a language so that he could talk to a lot of people, my advice is to stick with English.
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Learning a language for fun is a totally different thing :D
Russian is probably the most difficult languages spoken in Europe. But may I ask why you choose German over other European languages like Spanish or Italian? Was their a specific thing or was it just a random easy language and you already spoke English? Or is their even a difference in difficulty for you in English compared to German?
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Frankly speaking, many white people hate Chinese or any Asian in general. But I have been to Germany (Frankfurt) once and the people over there were surprisingly quite nice. And most German gamers such as you are also nice.
Since language learning is just a hobby for me (I have also been studying Japanese), I plan to only study the languages of the countries that I plan to visit. For reasons unknown, Chinese people in France, Italy and Spain are always the targets of robbery. So I will never bring my family to these countries. And German cities seem to be the safest places in Europe. So one of the main reasons why I study German is that I want to go to your country again in the future.
In Frankfurt, which is an international financial centre, to my big surprise very few people actually spoke English. There were several occasions when German people wanted to help me or say something to me but they just did not understand my English and could not speak a meaning English sentence. The only German people who could speak English in my trip were Hotel staff at the front desk, some shopkeepers, some waitresses and that's it.
As for difficulty, I am not qualified to call German language easy to learn as I am still a beginner. But I think English speakers can enjoy a lot of "free" cognate words when they study German or Dutch. It is different from studying a totally unrelated language, e.g. Korean.
Chinese is totally different from English and the two languages share very few cognates. So after mastering English, I find my brain more acceptive when it comes to strange grammar or pronunciation.
That said, the only thing that I have no hope is the German R.
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Sadly English is not that common in Germany even if it's probably the easiest language to learn if your first language is German.
For me the German R pronounced by east Asian people sounds super cute but I know how that is. I still have problems with "th" in English :/
But how are the articles for you? A lot of people ask me how they could learn them but I can't give them any advice because they are mostly super random. Are they easier for you than the R?
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As a beginner, I think even if the genders and cases are messed up, the meaning can still somehow get across.
It is like saying “They is good people” . Bad grammar but communication is no problem.
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You are underestimating Italian economy. Italy is one of the wealthiest major developed nations on Earth by national net wealth, and that is the reason is a country member of the G7.
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other than duolingo, which is an absolutely amazing app, there's mindsnacks games. It's not free but it's not that expensive and it's a really entertaining way to learn the basics while playing simple games with words.
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I am now using Pimsleur and Germanpod101 to study German and am basically satisfied.
You may try Italianpod101 for free for a week and decide if you want to keep learning the language.
But the problem is that most of these language learning tools demand you to have some basic knowledge of your target language. So please have your dictionary ready.
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I always think that Italian and Spanish people can understand each other...it seems that I am wrong.
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Hello, my native language is spanish, and i know english, i wanted to try to speak a new language and i tried italian, because why not?; So, where can i learn italian? Preferable from a spanish page
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