this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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[Outdated, please look at pinned post] Casual Conversation

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Disclaimer: full fluency, no studying required, but knowledge of the written language is not included.

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 7 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago

Living la vida loca

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

came here to point that out as well lol

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

That’s hilarious.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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?

[–] [email protected] 29 points 7 months ago

Chinese because Italian would be a lot easier to learn on my own.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Chooses Chinese:

  1. Monkey's paw curls
  2. Congratulations, you learned the Min dialect of Chinese!
[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

'3. You unlearned all other languages

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Chinese. Not for any high-minded reason, just to have access to a whole new culture of music, TV, movies, etc.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

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

[–] LambdaRX 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Italian, so i could read The Name of the Rose in original

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Excellent choice, I wonder if the original Italian would be even better!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

I've been and thought it was splendid.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

Italian is “La vita é bella”. This is Spanish. ಠᴗಠ

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Chinese. Already know multiple Indo-European languages. Would be cool to know other language families, I only speak languages from two right now.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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,

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

Italian, because i already know chinese, and since written knowledge isn't instantly gained it didn't help much in my case.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

Probably Chinese (Mandarin). More people speak it so it would be more useful.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Chinese simply by the fact that more people in the world speak Chinese. Plus, I'd be able to bettwr understand my favorite singer Jam Hsiao.

I don't know enough about the Italian language, any pop culture, or have enough interest in Italy to wanna be fluent in Italian.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Kind of an easy question for me.

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Would knowing the spoken language make learning the written side easier? Or does it likely depend on the language?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Going by the picture, each means successfully losing a shit ton of weight, so I’m down with either

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

I’m from the future. Go to China.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Definitely Chinese preferably Mandarin since I already know some.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Chinese. I go to a college with a lot of Chinese international students so it’d be cool to be able to talk to them in Chinese

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago
[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

Probaly Jomon (i.e. whatever was spoken by some of the first people to inhabit Japan).

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

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.