I have been an enthusiastic language learner since I was born, being brought up bilingual English and Italian. Since then I adopted language learning as a hobby in 2017 when I moved to China and discovered the joy of cross-cultural communication through a new language. Learning Chinese was a catalyst towards learning other languages and since then I dabbled in a variety of other languages. I speak many different languages at different levels. This page is dedicated to reviewing the languages I have experience with from the perspective of a language learner; specifically my perspective. As such it will be quite subjective, and wholly influenced by my particular circumstances.
French
28/09/2024
French is the first truly “foreign” language that I tangled with. During middle school I had French as a mandatory subject. At the time I remember finding it challenging, despite having about as big an advantage as one can have seeing as was already fluent in both English and Italian. English, of course, having many vocabulary words in common with the language, and Italian shares many of the same grammar structures. With hindsight I have realized that the issues I had with French were not issues with the language itself, but with the manner in which it was taught to me. In class we would focus heavily on grammar, with very little opportunity to engage with the spoken language in an authentic way. To my great surprised though, during a short-lived trip to France I was actually able to order food relatively comfortably in French, though I’m sure I was far from conversational.
During High School I abandoned French, though the basics remained with me. As I started to learn Chinese many years later, the little French I had started to get “replaced” as my Chinese improved. It took some effort, but through improving my French I was able to convince myself that Chinese and French were distinct languages, rather than being a single nebulous “third language” in my brain. Ultimately French was the first language I engaged with besides Chinese once I realized it would be possible to learn multiple languages as an adult. With French I made a crucial mistake: I started learning French almost exclusively through the written language, which of course diverges quite significantly from the spoken language. As a consequence I ended up with some fossilized bad pronunciation habits, and great difficulty with understanding the spoken language. Since then I have worked hard on improving my pronunciation and listening skills, and I can say that I am conversational. Not remarkable, but conversational. I can generally get my point across and I can understand most of what is being said to me. If I were to dedicate more time to it and really focus on expanding my vocabulary then I could definitely improve much more and quite quickly, but for the moment I am satisfied with what I have achieved.
Now, having provided more than enough context to my French journey, I can share my thoughts on the language itself.
Phonology: French has tough phonology from my experience, which is an issue that was exacerbated by my inefficient learning method (through the written language, as mentioned earlier).
Grammar: French grammar is very similar to Italian grammar, which makes it not particularly challenging for me to grapple with. Overall I would consider the grammar of French difficult for someone who doesn’t have any experience with romance languages.
Vocabulary: French vocabulary is not particularly difficult to pick up or guess for English/Italian speakers. There are many cognates with a few false friends.
Motivation: motivation is always subjective, so your views may differ but personally I did not find French a very motivating language to learn. French people are not particularly appreciative of novices trying to engage with their language, and thus require a high level of speaking ability until they are willing entertain speaking with a foreigner. There are, however, many French speakers who may or may not be native speakers who are happy to chat. Also, I didn’t find French particularly exciting, due to how many similarities it shares with languages I spoke already. There is a lot of interesting French media to engage with though, which can definitely aid with issues relating to motivation.
Final score: 6/10.
French is a world language and definitely worth picking up. You’ll never regret having some basic French skills, though it’s not a language I fell in love with or felt a great deal of excitement while learning. It’s a common theme for me to not find romance languages particularly enjoyable to learn because it feels like having to re-learn Italian with some slight differences. I prefer learning languages that are a bit further from what I already know, as nothing is more mentally stimulating than articulating your thoughts in a language that is “alien” compared to your mother tongue.
Spanish
29/09/2024
Spanish and Italian are extraordinarily close languages. There’s some degree of mutual intelligibility that comes for free, which made Spanish a very easy language to pick up for me. The biggest hurdle for Italian speakers is that some of the most commonly used Spanish words are the ones that diverged the most (e.g. Italian’s “guardare” compared with Spanish’s “mirar”), but once this initial small hurdle has been overcome Spanish practically already feels unlocked. There are some minor grammatical differences, but overall an Italian speaker can easily get away with speaking “Itañol”, i.e. Italian with some Spanish intermixed when necessary.
I started learning Spanish predominantly for work-related reasons. I occasionally travel to Spain for work, and having some basic knowledge of the language is of course quite convenient. All in all it’s also pretty low effort to pick up the basics, and so I thought that would be no reason not to commit a few months towards it. I would consider my Spanish roughly at the same level as my French: conversational, with limited vocabulary, but mostly able to get my point across and mostly able to understand the context of a conversation.
My biggest gripe with Spanish, again in a similar vein to French, is that it feels like I am learning Italian again. For many Italian vocabulary words I have to just learn the direct Spanish equivalent, which then slots in to a sentence structure which is very close to Italian. Spanish, unfortunately, is not a language which ignites my curiosity, though of course I do enjoy speaking to Spanish people in Spanish whenever I get the chance. Spanish people are very warm and friendly, generally speaking, which helps make learning Spanish feel worth it.
Pronunciation: Spanish pronunciation is very easy for Italian speakers, though it’s easy to be stuck with an Italian accent. The vowel sounds are nothing new, and the sounds that are not present in Italian are not particularly difficult to replicate, with the only exception being the “lispy” sounding letters c/s/z which are close to the dental fricative used in the English “th” sound. This is a feature that as far as I know is exclusive to the Spanish language used in Spain, and avoiding it does not impede intelligibility at all: whether you make this sound or not will not stop people from being able to understand you.
Grammar: Romance language grammar, very similar to Italian with some small differences which can be learnt quite quickly from my experience.
Vocabulary: Overall Spanish vocabulary is quite easy for Italian speakers, or speakers of other romance languages. Many cognates, a few false friends: just what you would expect.
Motivation: as pre-empted, my motivation to learn Spanish did not stem from curiosity, but when I am in Spain speaking to Spanish people my motivation is piqued. Spanish people are warm and friendly, and the food and culture is fantastic. It’s not a fun language to learn in a sterile environment in one’s home country, it is a language that gives its best when you’re living through it, ideally in a Spanish speaking country.
Final score: 7/10
Spanish is another language which is spoken all over the world. There is plenty of entertaining Spanish media, and plenty of interesting places and cultures to explore through the language itself. It’s a language that you won’t regret learning, and would be my first choice if I were living in the United States. The only downsides with Spanish are that from my experience it doesn’t pose as much of a intellectual challenge as some of the other languages I have learnt, especially for someone with a background in a romance language.
Japanese
01/03/2025
Japanese is a tough language to learn for native speakers of Indo-European languages. It’s an exciting and interesting language and regrettably my Japanese is currently still relatively basic.
My journey with Japanese started after I had already achieved quite a high level of proficiency with Chinese Mandarin, which has enabled me to quickly pick up reading in Japanese through being able to recognise the characters of Kanji. For those who may be away Kanji is directly based of Chinese Mandarin’s 汉字 (Hanzi) characters. Knowing Kanji gave me an enormously leg up towards learning the language, but despite this I found learning Japanese very difficult, for a variety of reasons. Japanese has a completely different sentence structure to any of the languages that I had experience with before. The verb is the last part of the sentence, and the sentence is built up backwardly from the verb. Verbs are conjugated, unlike Mandarin, which adds to the complexity. Seeing as Japanese is not an Indo-European language there are not many similarities in conjugation to use as a basis.
Generally speaking Japanese vocabulary is not particularly difficult. The words tend to be quite short compared to Afrikaans or German for instance, and there are many similarities to Mandarin vocabulary which to me was an advantage. Ironically I found that my biggest difficulties with Japanese vocabulary arose when learning vocabulary words which are not commonly written in kanji, as I found it more difficult to recognise the words when reading and therefore more difficult to learn. On the other hand though learning vocabulary words that are written in kanji was also sometimes quite different as my knowledge of the Mandarin pronunciation caused some interference, especially when reading text that didn’t have any pronunciation hiragana above the kanji as an aid. Many words in Japanese are directly derived from English or Dutch loan-words, these are known as Gairaigo 外来語. These are often easy to pick-up for English speakers, but it can be a bit unusual as the “correct” pronunciation can deviate quite substantially from the English pronunciation.
Pronunciation: ignoring pitch accent, being understandable in Japanese is not particularly difficult from the point of view of pronunciation. Japanese phonology is quite limited, and many of the sounds are found in English/Italian.
Grammar: Japanese grammar is difficult, and not particularly intuitive in my opinion. I would consider it comparable to Spanish in terms of difficulty, though perhaps my opinion on this will change as I improve my Japanese over time. For Spanish I could fall back on my knowledge of Italian grammar, but for Japanese I had no such advantage, so it would be better to compare learning Japanese grammar to learning Spanish grammar “from scratch”.
Vocabulary: I touched on Japanese vocabulary and the difficulties associated with it above. Primarily issues with Japanese vocabulary are related to the script in which the language is written, which can either be in a phonetic Hiragana or Katakana, or a more visually conceptual Kanji (which bears little hints towards the correct pronunciation).
Motivation: I can imagine many people are highly motivated to learn Japanese. I was not one of these people, unfortunately. Japanese is an amazing language and has a rich culture associated with it, but unfortunately there are not many Japanese people in my life and I am not living in Japan. Travel to Japan would certainly be interesting, but I have heard mixed reviews. Japanese, for me, would be primarily learned in order to consume media, as I have no intention of working in a Japanese speaking environment. As of now I don’t expect to use Japanese for work, but who knows what the future will bring, perhaps having to learn Japanese for work would give me a boost in motivation. I imagine that I would find Japanese a lot more motivating to learn if I wasn’t already proficient in Mandarin, as when I was learning Mandarin I was struck by the characters in the written script and by how intoxicatingly exotic it seemed to me at the time.
Final score: 7.5/10
Japanese is an extraordinary language and I can imagine that many people would find it highly enjoyable and useful to learn. I would rather dedicate my time to learning Japanese than learning an Indo-European language that is written in the Latin script. If I had fallen in love with Japanese like I did with Mandarin then I would certainly give this language a higher score, but unfortunately it never clicked with me in quite the same way. I’m open to revisiting this score in the future, as on paper Japanese should be right up my alley… Hopefully Japanese will pique your curiosity and give you the motivation needed to learn this complex and mesmerizing language.