i genuinely have no idea if i should study italian or french. on one hand, french is probably more useful, especially since i live in the u.s. and could communicate with people from french-speaking canada. french also seems to have more speakers. however, i also have an italian study book and it seems easier to get the hang of for me than french, especially since i can’t yet differentiate what people are saying and the way things are spelled in french.
i genuinely love both languages but i don’t know which one i should learn, even if i’m the only one who can decide this. i have a study book for italian and busuu as a language learning app but i don’t have a french book yet. should i learn italian first and then go with french? learn italian and pick up bits of french along the way?
Learning a language is easiest when you have opportunities to speak it. Which one are you more likely to use? A book might not be as effective as an app, like Duolingo or similar. Duolingo is free for a single language.
French phonetics is a bit more different from English, but both Italian and French are romance languages (based on Latin). Many English root words are Latin (also German, Greek, Dutch, and Indigenous languages). English also borrows loanwords from French and Italian, but pronunciations vary. I’d say both are relatively easy to learn as an English speaker (as is Spanish or Portuguese).
Grammatically, sentence structure is close to English. French introduces an extra word for negation which takes a little getting used to. “I cannot” becomes “Je ne peux pas” while Italian conjugates the verb to remove the subject “Non posso”.
One big difference with French is that there is a governing body that determines official French spelling and pronunciation. L’Académie Française was founded in the 17th century by the bad guy from the Three Musketeers, and is committed to maintaining linguistic purity. They tried for years to get French people to say “le courriel” instead of “email” but I don’t think anyone actually says that. Italy also has Accademia della Crusca, aka la Crusca, which had a similar function until the early 20th century when they were made more of an philology organization.
The benefit to both is that, once you understand spelling and diacritics, reading a word tells you precisely how to pronounce the word. The downside is that the languages have been basically stagnant for 350 years, so there are many strict, archaic phrases and sentence structures. English is notorious for homophones, homographs, and homonyms, which aren’t nearly as common in either French or Italian.
That said, reading from a book will never be the same as speaking with and listening to a native speaker. If you don’t have someone to practice with, there are online resources and probably local community options to find people who will help.
Just a small precision, courriel is from Quebec, and everyone* uses it cause it’s a great translation. It rolls off the tongue and was an excellent neologism from the Office Quebecoise du Francais. The académie wanted to use “mail” which is dumb and confusing and bring nothing to the language that just using “email” doesn’t already do. It is often a case study of how Quebec does some neologism better.
*Maybe a bit less in very colloquial speak, but still at least as common as using the anglicism.