Would it be a good idea to learn French & Italian togeth

Would it be a good idea to learn French & Italian together?
Or French & Spanish together? Or Italian & Spanish together?
Thank you very much for your suggestions(detailed reasons)!

Hmm... I wouldn't recommend learning Spanish and Italian together. They're similar enough that it's easy to get them mixed up. French is different enough that you're probably much safer learning one of those and French together. French's phonology, morphology, and orthography are pretty different from the other languages, whereas Spanish and Italian are very similar in those respects.

I'm an intermediate Spanish student and, though I might like to learn Italian someday, I think it would still be a bad idea for me to do it right now... I think I should wait until I achieve a fuller fluency level in Spanish. Right now I'm just starting to develop fluency, and I'm quite a ways away from understanding the spoken language.

- Kef

furrykef, grazie mille, I can understand what you said, now I completely exclude the feasibility of Italian & Spanish together. And which combination would be better then? "French+Italian"? "French+Spanish"? Thanks again!

You seem to have made your mind already.
Go for French + Italian.

Of course, one could also ask, do you have to learn two languages at the same time?

I don't totally agree with kef. From a phonological point of view Italian and French are quite different but grammatically and sintactically, in my opinion, they are more similar than Spanish to a certain extent:
Italian French:
use of two different verbs to form the compound tenses, spanish just one
the partitive article
some pronominal particles like in french y, en; Italian ci, ne, ce vi, ve.
presence in both languages of some irreguliar plurals unlike Spanish.

Not the same time.

Step by step.

First, French.

Second, Italian.

I always thought it made more sense to concentrate on one language at a time, at least in the beginning.

In school, you also learn two or three languages at a time, besides others! (And besides the terror in the classroom!)

I don't think there's any problem with learning Spanish and Italian if you don't intend to learn them both at the same time. You would just need to put a few years in between them to ensure you don't confuse them.

I don't know if the similarity of grammar between French and Italian would be a big problem... but my guess is that it would present much fewer problems than vocabulary. Grammar and vocabulary are fundamentally different... grammar is a set of rules -- although those rules are often not very well-defined -- whereas a vocabulary is a really big list of words and their meanings. The mind handles them entirely differently.

However, I can only speculate, as I haven't actually tried learning any languages in detail other than Spanish and Japanese.

- Kef

The other day I was watching this show called, ¿Qué dice la gente? (Mexican version of Family Feud), so there was this Italian family and the host asked this guy, how do you say ¿Qué dice la gente? in Italian? and the guy said ¿Qué diche la yente? (or something like that), but It sounded so similar, if I was a basic Spanish or Italian speaker I would propably get really confused.

<<In school, you also learn two or three languages at a time, besides others!>>

But don't you usually start studying them in separated years?


<<However, I can only speculate, as I haven't actually tried learning any languages in detail other than Spanish and Japanese. >>

Aha, I've been learning Japanese myself^^
It's hard to improve when one doesn't listen to the language very often, isn't it? Think it's a very interesting language though.

"The other day I was watching this show called, ¿Qué dice la gente? (Mexican version of Family Feud), so there was this Italian family and the host asked this guy, how do you say ¿Qué dice la gente? in Italian? and the guy said ¿Qué diche la yente? (or something like that), but It sounded so similar, if I was a basic Spanish or Italian speaker I would propably get really confused."


Not quite. First, there are no "Y's" or "J's" in Italian. Second I think it would be closer to something like "quella gente dice?" because I know the word order would be different and more similar to Portuguese and the pronunciation of "gente" would be closer to Br.Portuguese then to Latin American Castellano (with the exception of the Rio Platense variation of Castellano).

While it's generally not advisable to start learning 2 languages together, I shall also add that French & Italian would be less catastrophic than Italian & Spanish. I don't know any of them, but judging the spelling alone, French is "different" enough from others.

Please make sure you can do the following before learning the next:
- know all the basic grammar rules well, so that you don't recall it by rote but use it actively (reading / speaking would do)
- know enough vocabulary (e.g. 3000-5000, not counting conjugated forms or very functional words) to deal with most "easy" situations

I guess that a person speaking a European language and new to (self-)language learning would need roughly 8 months to 2 years to learn either combination above, depending on learning intensity and, of course, efforts spent on languages.

If you are decent with languages or have a good ear, learn French and Spanish at the same time. I did this and it worked out just fine. It actually helped me and well, jmo, but learn those languages and you'll find a lot of other romance languages easy to understand.

I know that Mr. Micheloud tells everyone to learn just one language at a time on his fine site, but that's not advice for everyone. It depends on how you learn, how much you can take in. If you are a "sponge", just soak up the languages at the same time.

I know that, inside Europe (not throughout the world), German is not only the most important language, but also the most widely spoken language, and German even possesses more speakers than English or French. Although German belongs to Germanic language group, it's very different from another Germanic language---English, on grammar, syntax and vocabularies. So I think that, it wouldn't be very easy for me to learn French & German together. But Italian grammar and vocabularies are similar to French, to a great extent. And I feel that, to my ears, Italian sounds more euphoniously than Spanish. So I would probably choose the combination of French & Italian. At last, thank you very much for your various suggestions.