If I was a young man again, Italian. Because aside from French, it does the most for ladies; especially those that don’t understand the language.
At my current age, Chinese. Because it will come in the most useful for WWIII. After all, when China finally invades Taiwan, western powers are going to go all racist again with internment camps to hold visibly ethnic people, and not all of them will know English well. They will need translator advocates.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Being fluent in English and native Spanish, my first choice would be Chinese, because it opens your reach to another half of the world. But a language I would really like to learn is Japanese.
I’ve studied Italian before and while I dropped it pretty early, of the language classes I took I found it pretty comfortable to learn. If I wanted to become fluent I feel confident I could. I’ve actually been debating whether to take it or a French course as a hobby lately.
With Chinese I’ve had difficulty even differentiating words or learning basic phrases from friends who speak it. I don’t think I could become fluent even if I dedicated myself. Getting it by magic is the only way I’m going to learn it. It’s also by far the more useful of the two languages.
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.
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