As a French native speaker who also learnt Italian in high school, I would say that French prononciation is harder due to the silent letters and some letters combinations (eau, au, eaux, aux, all pronounced the same) while Italian prononciation is more straight forward.

@dusk6159

8 ай бұрын

Straightest out of english and french both too, that is one side where it's definitely less complicated and more helping.

@JTulou

8 ай бұрын

@@dusk6159 Actually, Italian and English are very complicated when it comes to guessing which syllable is accentuated. As for French, pronunciation may not be easy at first sight, but actually rules are very consistent, with accentuation being a no-brainer.

@Chiamami_Capo

8 ай бұрын

French is easier to speak because it is very flat with no relief, but harder to write because there are many more endings and rules that modify the end of the word (i speak both i'm italian)

@bravocarlos1752

3 ай бұрын

I took French in high school for 2 years I passed it but it came off very difficult for me The pronunciations, reading it and pretty much everything that you named I had an issue with I'm learning Latin now just started and already it's easier especially with pronunciations

@bravocarlos1752

3 ай бұрын

​@@Chiamami_CapoI had issues with pronunciation but definitely reading and writing I was horrible at it it was so difficult😂

As someone with Portuguese as a first language, french is harder to learn.

@nicolasrenaud6875

8 ай бұрын

Ironicamente, eu falo francês como lingua materna, e aprendo a lingua portuguesa, sobretodo com pessoas do Brasil, depois de haver aprendido o espanhol, e eu fiquei bem sorpreendido da quantitade de semelheças entre as duas linguas, fr e pt. Falo de semelhenças sobretodo nas foneticas, mas tambem em algumas regras gramaticais ou de sintaxis, mais parecidas entre elas que tipo com o espanhol achei, ademais de uso de varias palavras de vocabulario com origens comuns, tipo mais comum que com o espanhol, ou até varios empréstimos do francês no português de lá. Eu tenho uma hipotesis que, no lado dos lusofonos, do Brasil ao menos, poucas pessoas aprendem em vero o francês e entao que se creeu como uma mitifacaçao do francês sendo muito chique e tambem bem complicado. Tambem me sucedeu, com umas companheiras de intercambio linguístico, eu intentando de ajudar no processo de aprendizagem do francês delas, tentavam dizer/escrever frases na lingua e dava algum decalco as vezes do espanhol, as vezes do inglês, em gramatica, e pois eu dando uma forma mais correcta e fiquamos chocados que este mais similar originalmente com o português, mas a coisa mais engraçada e que elas voltavam quase sempre na logica de decalcar do inglês as vezes do espanhol para traduzir em francês, mesmo se errabam talvez a maiora do tempo, logo se queixando achando o francês dificil demais. Mas, bom, talvez exagero as semelhanças. O que opina?

@lucasrodrigues9766

8 ай бұрын

​@@nicolasrenaud6875talvez haja alguma semelhança de vocabulário, mas com certeza aprender espanhol ou italiano deve ser mais fácil para franceses que aprender português. O que complica o francês é a pronúncia que não tem nada a ver com a escrita da palavra. Por exemplo, a palavra 'temps' é pronunciada como tã, totalmente diferente. O aprendiz precisa focar bastante para aprender a pronúncia, enquanto que com outro línguas não. Eu aprendo alemão e acho uma boa não ter que ficar na dúvida como uma palavra nova é pronunciada, pois a pronúncia está atrelada a escrita

@nicolasrenaud6875

8 ай бұрын

@@lucasrodrigues9766 hmmmm, interesante. Eu, francófono, nao sinto mais dificultade em aprender português, depois de haver aprendido espanhol, até as vezes acho mais facil. Em quanto ao q complica o francês, sim entendo bem o problema da escritura algo meia arcaica, com menos coordondencia ao oral, e pois entendo que hoje na nossa epoca aprender uma lingua vem automaticamente com aprender como escrever esta... mas, a escritura nao tem que ver com a lingua em propio, é uma coisa externa à lingua que é uma comunicaçao falada, né? Bom, pessoalmente só acho um pouco bizarro que a coisa que com frequencia se diz mais dificil de uma lingua como a minha, é a escritura, que teoricamente nao é a lingua. As vezes, duvido do pensamiento generalizado que a aprendizagem de uma lingua passaria primeiro com ao dominar a sua escritura ... Enfim, muito sucesso ao aprender suas linguas desejadas!

@lxportugal9343

8 ай бұрын

Plus....as someone who studied French for 3 years, and no Italian, the level of compreension is about the same. And if the Italian speaks slower, the understanding of Italian becames higher than the french. But I have to admit if I was exposed to french in the same level as I'm to English (Hollywood fault) my french would be enormosly better

@stephanedumas8329

8 ай бұрын

​@@williamgrey1334No French is more simular italian than portuguese 90% lexical Italian portuguese 80%

Well, as a native French speaker I would learn Italian since I already know French! Having said that, to all the Italian speakers thinking about learning French, there is no need to try speaking French like a native. In fact if you speak reasonable French with an Italian accent, you will sound incredibly sexy and attractive to a French person!

For French, if you don't pay attention to its crazy orthography, but just to how it sounds, than you may realize that French is much more simpler.

@wolfrinorich6993

2 ай бұрын

No

For a German speaker, Italian is infinitely easier. I learned it in a couple of months by mere exposure. Decades of French were in vain. I started to understand French after and because I had learned Italian in the meantime.. I still can't speak it. Reasons: 1) Easy Italian phonetics just five vowels. Most consonants are easy, never mind if you don't get gn, gli, z/s right. Nor do Romans. 2) much slower. Most words have three to four syllables, with French one or two. Italian does not drop anything at the end. Easy to synchronise. When you hear something in Italian you can repeat it, even if you don't know what it means. Word borders are quite clear, due to the emphasis on the penultimate syllable. 3) Almost random orthography in French. You might guess how something written is pronounced in French. No way, the other way round. Eau,eux, au, aux? Peut, peux? You have to study abstract grammar to be able to write in French, even the simplest text. In Italian, you basically write what you say. There are very few homonyms in Italian. You will never get fully functional in French without taking years of classes.In Italian you go better with time but without effort. 4) You can absorb the grammar through hearing rather than studying because all grammar is spoken in Italian but not in French. They write the plural but mostly don't speak it. All this sounds the same; aller, allè, alleès, allait, allais, allez figure out what it means when you hear it: andare, andato/a/i/e, andava, andavi, andate. What about lit, lits, lis 5) French have no open ear for variations of their language because dialects are basically extinct. So they don't understand me. In Italian, the worst of all German accents does not hinder communication. Except for conjugation, Italian is a lot easier than English. While there a couple of too many tenses, it is much more orderly and predictable than English with its numerous and pointless continuous ing forms and futures. Went, have/had gone, was going, have been going, had/have been going or gone, will have been going WTH. Total mess. The difference between French and Italian in difficulty is about 1:10 in terms of time needed to acquire. Usefulness? Well is there anything "useful" besides English? Maybe Russian when you go to the exUSSR or Chinese. If your mother tongue is Spanish, this is infinitely more useful than either Italian or French and almost as easy as Italian. As a Spanish speaker don't study Italian, you understand it anyway and in a couple of weeks you speak it. The only reason to study Italian is when you are Spanish and have to study a second language other than English and Portuguese is not on offer.

@nathcascen473

19 күн бұрын

wow astonished learnt a language i na couple of months,here to get graduated in italain language require years ,u must be a genius.

Italian, in my experience, has a lower treshold to start learning because of grammar and pronounciation but also I find Italians to be more accommodating and encouraging towards foreigners who butcher their language which makes it more rewarding and less scary to practice. But it's not easy to master. When it comes from loan words... as a Swede Italian also expanded my English vocabulary understanding more of the "fancy" latin words.

As an Italian I learned French in school and I can say that after a couple of months it becomes extremely easy to understand both written and spoken. That's why many Italians will tell you that they "learned" French in two weeks and it was easy. Please, do not trust them. When it comes to grammar (and tons of exceptions), correct pronounciation and most of all writing, they will fall like pears. Of course, most French people will understand an Italian trying his/her best in French but accordingly to how bad your French is in their standards they will reply in English, which is English-with-a-French-accent. They cannot help it, especially in Paris.

I speak French, with no formal training, after living in France, but still struggle with understanding spoken French. When I hear or read Italian, it's uncanny how easy it is to follow.

I’m a native English speaker in the US. Spanish is my second language, and I studied it for several years from grade school through university, so that may give me a bias. With that said, I found Italian several orders of magnitude easier to pick up than French. For me French is the most difficult Romance language I’ve tried in terms of pronunciation. One last qualifier I’ll add though, is I also had more motivation to learn Italian, because I have Italian friends and have visited multiple times.

@tuluppampam

8 ай бұрын

I've seen French described as "The Danish of Romance languages", and it is very fitting

@yannsalmon2988

8 ай бұрын

⁠​It’s totally true that our language is the hardest of Romance languages to learn IMO, even for other European Romance languages. But the trick is precisely that it’s way easier to go from French to Spanish, Portuguese or Italian than the other way around. If you plan to learn it eventually, leaving to last may not be the best strategy… I might add that I don’t know how it is in other European countries, but I did have Latin lessons at school that really helped getting into other Romance languages (and oddly even a bit with Japanese). I suppose (might be wrong though) that it’s an option that is rarely considered by US English speakers interested in Romance languages learning.

@yannsalmon2988

8 ай бұрын

On that thought, I really think that someone should propose « bulk » Romance languages lessons that, either than focusing on one particular language, would approach them from a common base perspective.

@tbessie

8 ай бұрын

@@tuluppampam Why Danish? Is that because (as I've heard other Germanic language speakers say) it sounds like someone speaking with a mouth full of marbles? :-D

@tuluppampam

8 ай бұрын

@@tbessie because Danish sounds very different from other languages in its family There's also the fact that Danish underwent many phonological changes that are, in a certain way, very similar to that of French But at least French doesn't sound like a throat condition like Danish

As a french native speaker who is trying to learn Italian. I must say Italian is a bit easier to to learn Italian than Spanish.

As a Romanian that speaks both Italian and French, I would say that French is more difficult. About speaking a very sophisticated, academic Italian, which I can't, I am always in awe listening to it being spoken.

I’m Brazilian and I’m learning both. I find French is harder, but not WAY harder. Both languages have some similar words comparing to each other, or English or Spanish or Portuguese, so that often helps me when learning new words. Grammar seems similar too and to me the pronunciation is usually not quite challenging, but the Italian one is closer to Portuguese and Spanish. Prepositions ard challenging in both French and Italian in my opinion.

As an English speaker: Italian is easier. Much easier.

My native languages are French and English. I live in France on the Italian border and started to learn italian 6 years ago. I find it relatively easy to learn as the grammar is close to French grammar and by living on the border l am able to practice daily. I have achieved a C1 level.

I speak both, but my native languages are English and German. I'd say that Italian is easier. Spelling is mostly phonetic, and pronunciation is mostly straightforward. French spelling is nuts (but not as crazy as English spelling) and French has more sounds. French vocabulary is more international, but Italian isn't too hard either. French also has more homophones, words that are spelled differently but pronounced the same. Grammar is similar, with Italian maybe slightly harder. Italian used a few more tenses (like 'se fosse stato'). In Italian, every conjugation is pronounced, whereas in French the conjugation is partly silent. For example, for 'manger', 4 of the 6 present forms are pronounced the same (je, tu, il, ils, whose forms are spelled mange, manges, mange, mangent, but which sound the same). This does mean, however, that speaking and writing are two very different challenges in French.

As a Italian speaker I find French and Romanian to be harder to understand, but for Spanish no problemo

I took Italian. There are Latin roots which much of medical lingo uses..it will help in that respect. I took it to fully understand my Italian boyfriend from his perspective. My younger son speaks French. I've tried to learn French, but there are so many words with letters that are not pronounced or swallowed sounding. Whereas Italian pronounces every bit of a word.

Well, I'm a native Spanish speaker, and most deffinitely Italian is a lot easier, so much so that in the past I worked for a while with an Italian dude on a project and there was a point where we started communicating without the use of English. French on the other hand, I can barely understand anything. I know its a romance language and it shares a high amount of similarities with Spanish, but I simply can't understand French, except for some random words here and there. Even trying to read French it's hard for me. Something similar happens with my understanding of portuguese, but to a much lesser extent. Maybe because the spelling and pronnunciations of both Portuguese and French are so different. So personally, I think Italian first and catalan second are prolly the easiest romance languages for a Spanish speaker to pick up. (Sorry about my poor English)

@keithkannenberg7414

8 ай бұрын

You have nothing to apologize for.

@leo_almirez

8 ай бұрын

@@keithkannenberg7414 thanks mate! Cheers!

I tried to learn French first. It was cool while it lasted, however the biggest hurdle is its pronunciation which is non-existent in my mother tongue. Then I shifted to Italian, which I still struggle with in terms of grammar. But because my dad is Filipino and mom Japanese, pronunciation is not a big deal for me save for some few sounds (I still hate having to say words with a 'gli') as it is similar to the languages I have spoken since childhood. Italiano è facile rispetto a francese. Spero di avere una conversazione normale nella lingua italiana un giorno. È sempre la mia ambizione parlare una lingua straniera. Forse imparo francese di nuovo dopo un decennio 😊

@ferruccioveglio8090

8 ай бұрын

Bravo!

For a future video you should take a look at Yola. A form of old English (with some Norman French) that was spoken in south east Ireland. It has died out now, but there was people speaking it right up until the early 20th century.

As a Spanish speaker, I've learned both languages and I find French harder to learn. Ironically, I learned French first. It was kinda difficult. Italian has been a walk in the park

I don't speak Italian but it sounds way more similar to Spanish pronunciation, which is fairly easy. When I learned French however, I had to learn several new sounds which do not exist in neither Spanish or English (the languages I already spoke). Grammar seems fairly similar in all Romance languages so I agree that isn't a factor. All in all, French seems harder.

@xneapolisx

8 ай бұрын

I'm a native Italian speaker, and I concur with what you wrote wholeheartedly.

@valerietaylor9615

8 ай бұрын

The hardest thing about French is the spelling. I didn’t have too much trouble with the pronunciation, because I had already had three years of German when I first took up French, and both languages have the uvular “r” and the rounded vowels ( u-umlaut and o- umlaut in German, u and e in French.)

@gaston6800

8 ай бұрын

@@valerietaylor9615 Yeah, but unlike English, the pronunciation in French is consistent once you learn the sounds of each diphthong. It's definitely harder than Italian, but I think the spelling aspect of French is overblown.

@tuluppampam

8 ай бұрын

​@@valerietaylor9615southern varieties of German prefer the alveolar trill to the uvular fricative as as a rhotic sound

As a romanian native speaker, I find french much harder to learn. Italian and spanish come very easy and natural for me, even though I've been studying french since kindergarden.

I had 8.5 years of French in school. Forgot most of it when I learned French. Now I’m looking into French and Italian in Duolingo. French is coming back, Italian grammar is quite difficult in some respects.

@luigibolognesi9559

6 ай бұрын

I think French grammar is a little easier than italian

Native English speaker here…former US Army linguist. Language school-trained in Spanish, French, and Indonesian. Took both Spanish (3 yrs) and German (2 yrs) in High School (in the 1980s). I want to learn Italian and Catalan.

@fixer1140

8 ай бұрын

If you already have a decent level of spanish, Italian will be like a walk in the park. Also portuguese.

I'm a North American who has studied both French and Spanish, I think that Italian is more accessible because of the reasons stated; Italian is more phonetic, what you see in writing is how it's pronounced. French always seemed to me to have random letters thrown in all over the place. i "aced" two semesters of college level French, but it was a lot of work. When I went to Italy, with just reading an Italian phrase book on the flight over, i was able to "fake" enough Italian to get by. Besides, the Italians could not be anymore gracious and helpful to a bumbling Americano who was trying to speak their language.

Italian grammar really challenged both Big and Small, so Italian is more difficult and harder.

I did some French just for fun growing up, and I think I did just enough for my brain to respond to the language better. Even though it wasn't a serious effort, many years later, I've picked it up again. I started Spanish in high school, and that's not bad either, but sometimes to remember grammar rules and vocab and comparing it to French first before evaluating if this specific instance is different. I've poked at Italian. I'll come back to it I'm sure, but funnily enough my brain doesn't want to deal with it. Heck, I'm having fun with Latin and infer my Spanish to it, but no, my brain gets annoyed at Italian over silly things like, "Why are French and Spanish articles more aligned than Spanish and Italian? What's with these articles?" lol.

I’m an Indonesian, whose national language has a very similar pronunciation to Italian. We roll our Rs and we’re used to phonetic orthography like in Italian and Spanish. On the other hand, many sounds in the French language are challenging for most of us to pronounce, including the uvular R and the voiced postalveolar fricative J. At the moment, I’m learning French, Italian, and Spanish at the same time (yes, I know it’s a bad idea). And yet… I found French grammar to be the easiest to understand and the conjugations in the language are the least difficult to figure out 😂

True indeed. Italian language vowels pronunciation it is a challenge even for Romanians people, even if both languages are somewhat similar. For me, Italian language it is easier than French language. But, I can’t attest that I can speak Italian language at fluent level. Recently I’ve had planned to practice it daily, so I can reach fluent level, some day. Thanks so much for the video!

Italian having a stressed syllable in each word makes it much easier to identify individual words in spoken Italian-

For speakers of romance languages, I feel like you can simply get familiar with the pronounciation of the other romance languages, and then you can understand a lot. If you want to submerge in a culture then you should learn the particular language. But if you only want a tool for fast comunication, you could learn Interlingua, Romance Neolatino or others. I'm getting familiar with the pronounciation of portuguese, italian and french because I like to sing in those languages with my guitar, and one of those auxiliary languages might give me a general overview of all the romance languages. I only speak spanish and english now.

@yannsalmon2988

8 ай бұрын

Have you also noticed that it’s somehow easier to sing convincingly in another language than speaking it ?

@peregrination3643

8 ай бұрын

@@yannsalmon2988 I have quite a bit of Japanese, French, and Italian music that I like to sing. As long as it's not a super fast song, it's MUCH easier to pick up the language's rhythm than if spoken for all three. Glad there's a few people here making similar comments.

Romanian here. Learned basic Italian in two weeks via Google Translate/Duolingo. French is the 2nd closest lingo to mine after Italian; I can understand maybe 5 words in French. Here in Miami, I fully understand Spanish which is the most distant cousin of Romanian.

Looking forward to your video about the various R sounds!

italian seems to be easier on the surface, but its actually harder ... I had to learn this lesson myself lol

Chilean can master Italian real quick. So many words and expressions are so similar. BTW, as a side note, my brother chose Metatrón as his construction company name 12 years ago. Haven't seen it around until I saw your KZread channel.

As someone who learned and speaks both at a fairly high level, I'd say that italian is easier when it comes to pronunciation and french in terms of general grammar.

Can you do European Portuguese compared to Italian?

Man, I love all your videos. Keep up the great work. They are all very sophisticated and well thought out.

Native Spanish speaker, English as a second language now learning French and Italian....French I definitely harder!

If you do a video on the letter R, you should look into some Slavic pronunciations as well to give more dynamics to the topic. I know in Czech the R with a diacritic above it has a guttural sound added to it.

As an English speaker - French vocabulary is more familiar and sounds like sophisticated English. Italian in its oral form is easier to understand and even pronounce.

I wouldn’t advise anyone to learn a language based on how “easy” it is perceived to be. Ultimately, the “easiest” language to learn is the one you most want to learn - the question, before acquiring any language or even just any skill - is how *motivated* are you to acquire it?

As a Chilean, after studying French during 2 years at school and 0 day studying Italian, I can safely say that French is almost impossible to understand for me. Standard Italian (like Standard Portuguese) is very very easy to understand.

For me ( im Slovenian) Italian is much, much easier!

One aspect that you don’t mention is comprehension. I know quite a lot of French but I still find decoding spoken French quite challenging. The words run together and are difficult to pick apart. My sense is that understanding spoken Italian, at least in its standard form is less challenging.

@tuluppampam

8 ай бұрын

Here's the problem: noone speaks standard Italian On another note, french has some interesting quirks with its pronunciation, mostly related to accent (it's weird. And I'm talking about the equivalent of stress) Italian, on the other hand, has a much more reasonable accent system, which is harder to pronounce properly (because it's a stress accent but it also does a couple of weird things)

@Metatron's Academy will you be interested in the dalmatian language the language is officially extinct but you can still learn it in Split, even on a few small islands where the residents still speak a kind of dialect of Dalmatian/latin

Italian is spoken in Albania

As someone who is currently learning both French and Italian I find understanding spoken French incredibly difficult but have no problems with spoken Italian. I know I suffer worse than most with this but personally I feel French is way more difficult than French

Nice video, as always. I like your balanced approach a lot. Regarding the two languages, as a Romanian myself, I would say Italian is easier hands down. I took years of French in school, and put an effort into it, and I am still not quite at a C1-C2 level. Italian I learned 90% by listening to podcasts, catching some shows and reading a few books, in some 2 years and I've been asked by quite a number of Italians, already, if I am Italian or in which region I was born. Romanian and Italian are extremely close when it comes to pronunciation (with exceptions, of course). I would even say closer than Spanish and Italian.

lot of respect for all your video's

Although I'm not a professional singer, I studied classical voice for some years and have spent a lot of time hanging around serious classical singers, listening to operas, etc. You had talked about some classical singers over-pronouncing the trilled R in Italian (I think); I'd been told by several music teachers that that is a standard thing, as classically sung Italian, French, German (and I presume a lot of other languages) use pronunciation rules that differ slightly from the spoken varieties. For instance, in spoken French you don't pronounce the letter 'e' at the end of words where they force the pronunciation of the previous consonant; but in classical singing of French, you DO (eg. the word "personne" (meaning "nobody") would be pronounced when spoken with just the 'n' sound at the end, but with an 'ne' sound when classically sung). I've noticed much more front trilled R's in both Italian and German classical singing as well.

Hello Metatron. To someone from Northern England, this sounds like a question about the rugby team front row. Also the Prince song about little red corguettes would sound odd as "zucchinis", but so would it with "those posh cucumber things" (what do you mean it was a car?). I learned French from nine, but found Italians more forgiving of foreigners trying to communicate (perhaps it was that I am English). I did get asked out at university by a girl from France, but she was half Spanish and some might say that it showed (it was in Manchester, if anyone reading gets the song reference).

Learning both 👍

I love your videos

What about Spanish and Italian? I am an Afrikaans speaker (this is similar to Vlaams), I would like to learn a new language for my own improvement and enjoyment. I love both cultures. I am a teacher at a school (probably the only school in South Africa) that teaches Classical Latin to all learners from the age of 9. So I have been exposed to that. Your channel has really inspired! Thank you for your amazing work!

@byrnon

8 ай бұрын

Metatron did a video on the difficulty of Spanish vs Italian. Check it out!

As a Brit whose first foreign language was French but who is now more fluent in Italian, i.e. speaks reads and writes it with correct grammar and syntax, I would say French is more difficult starting off with gender identification that is much simpler in Italian where there are only a few exceptions whereas French orthography isn't much of a help. As someone else here said French has "silent" letters while in "good" spoken Italian letters are pronounced. I remember from grammar school sentences like "the dog chained to the oak tree", chien, chaine and chene. All very subtle pronumciation differences.

Slowing learning Italian, because I love the Italian rock group, Måneskin

As a native spanish speaker who also speaks Portuguese, I believe that French is the most difficult. I can speak some Italian, I can understand quite a lot, but French is a boss battle.

If you know English, French is easier, if you know Spanish, Italian is easier

For a spanish speaker i feel the same with português. People can understand you easily but in terms of pronunciation is very difficult for a native Spanish speaker get the different vowels.

I am a native American English speaker. Spanish is my 2nd language. For me, spelling in French is harder than that in Italian. The diacritical marks is the hard part!😖 Overall for me, Italian is much easier because of my foreknowledge in Spanish. No knock on French: I use it when I travel to Canada 🇨🇦.

@ottovonbismarck8460

8 ай бұрын

French in Canada is putrid sounding especially in Quebec (I’m Canadian)

@WineSippingCowboy

8 ай бұрын

@@ottovonbismarck8460 Nasal 👃 more than in Europe 🇪🇺.

For English speakers a huge portion of English vocabulary is French. It doesn’t take all that long to learn French spelling and pronunciation, however, in my opinion, the large number of homophones make understanding spoken French the biggest challenge. I don’t know anything about Italian.

As a german speaker i found french quite challenging compared to english. The R was not an issue though as french and german are similar in that regard.

@valerietaylor9615

8 ай бұрын

Ja! Oui! Sie haben recht. Vous avez raison.

@yannsalmon2988

8 ай бұрын

As a French speaker, I consider that German is the most challenging main European language to understand for me. Mastering English helps quite a bit though. That said, no offense, but as a graphics designer that had to suffer trying to fit a lot of multilingual layouts, I have to say it : your language is a nightmare to work with as a text paragraph !

@theChaosKe

8 ай бұрын

@@yannsalmon2988 Is it because of the umlaut letters? German has quite a few loan words from french and there is this cute trend where you can either use the original french spelling (without the accents though as german doesnt have those) or you can use a spelling that uses a more german phonetical system. This creates some funny spellings of french words like salü for salut or allüre for allure which i find quite amusing to see.

@yannsalmon2988

8 ай бұрын

@@theChaosKeThe problem I had was more simple : it’s soooooo damn long ! The same paragraph in English is about 1.5 times as long when translated in French, Spanish or Italian. When translated in German it’s 2 to 2.5 times ! And I don’t talk about all your never ending words that I couldn’t tell where and if I could hyphenate them at the end of a line. If I had to make multiple language versions of the same layout, and I was doing it all from scratch myself, I’d always start with German to place and size the text elements. Because, if it fits in German, everything will fit. But sometimes I had to adapt existing layouts calibrated on… English. It was like trying to put an elephant inside the trunk of a VW Beetle every time.

I studied French for a number of years and reached a decent level (~B2?) before starting to learn Italian. It's hard to say for sure whether my previous Romance language experience (and language learning experience in general) has biased me in this regard, but it certainly seems like Italian has been easier to pick up. Oral comprehension has been definitely easier. I listened to French videos at 75% for a long time before I could process it well enough to be comfortable listening at normal speed. With Italian I haven't had to do this - very quickly I could make out all the words (as long as the diction was good) even if I didn't always know what everything meant. OTOH, when it comes to reading I think they're pretty similar for an Anglophone. French is maybe just a little bit easier because I think the cognates tend to be spelled more similarly to English.

As a person who Speaks Catalan, Spanish, French and listens to Italian news. French stands as the hardestbof them all.

Excellent topic! I have a similar one : How hard Italian is for a French speaker? If a native French speaker like me try to learn Italian, how hard would it be?

@yannsalmon2988

8 ай бұрын

Italian may be the easiest language to learn for us French, Spanish coming second but not very far. Those languages have the advantage of being fairly easy to understand for a French person in their written form. By that I mean that you will recognize a lot of words as you read, whereas you may not recognize those same words when they are spoken. This is all relatively speaking of course, no new language is acquired without any effort. One easy thing to try to get an idea of how hard it could be is to look at a movie in Italian with the corresponding Italian subtitles. You can try it with Spanish too to compare. In both cases though, beware of the « faux amis », there are also lots of words that ressemble French words but have very different meanings.

@senbonzakurakageyoshi662

8 ай бұрын

@@yannsalmon2988I have study both Italian and Spanish in the past (superficially) and even though Italian is the closest to French I have less problem understanding a Spanish speaker speaking (slowly) than Italian, but I had more exposure to Spanish in the past (mostly with Mexican immigrants and Colombians) so it's really fair 😅

Très bien! Molto bene! I had the good fortune to learn these two languages - Italian and French - as well as Spanish as a child in England, plus English from my mother and the surrounding community, so I did'nt have to choose. I then studied all 3 Romance languages at school, starting from French, which was undoubtedly a good thing because, as you say, French is "probablement un peu plus difficile". ;-) Also, as you say, the deciding factors would be others, such as cultural interest, etc. Re pronunciation, I notice that many people particularly Anglophones seem to think that to speak a foreign language you need to speak with a "native" accent, but while that is of course preferable, and some people do succeed in achieving this aim - eg you in British English and Luke Ranieri in Italian - one can live and work in French- and Italian-speaking environments with a noticeable "foreign" accent. A good example in Italy is the well-known American journalist Alan Friedman and before him many others like Dan Peterson, a basketball coach, and Don Lurio, an entertainer. They are or were all unmistakably American, but they speak or spoke very fluent Italian. I say this to encourage people. Personally, I should improve my accent in Italian, as I come from a Northern dialect background, but I don't think I would improve my popularity where I live by saying "Bène, a Rroma si parla così" or, worse still, "Io do sempre il prodotto P... ai miei Hani ( = cani)" with a Florentine accent. ;-) PS. I also like your video on Spanish VS Italian: Which is harder?

@yannsalmon2988

8 ай бұрын

Agreed. Learning the correct pronunciation of words and speaking without accent are two different things. It’s better to speak effortlessly with an English accent than struggling to speak « perfectly ». Personally, there’s a bit of « uncanny valley » feeling when someone visibly foreign speaks without any accent at all. Paradoxically, as a native, you will then try to spot any remnants of the speaker’s native language. I know I do when I listen to Jodie Foster speaking French for example : « There it is ! This tiny little bit of English accent on that particular word… ». Trying to speak « like a native » at any price will expose you to a lot more of criticisms and corrections than if you talk casually with your own accent. Especially with us French people.

@chiclett

3 ай бұрын

Yes, "probabilmente un po' più difficile"

Nice video ! Small remark: french is also pronounced the way it’s written aka once you know the pronunciation rules you can pronounce anything, even new words. This is not the case in english for instance (especially words ending in ough, you need to know the word beforehand to pronounce it). The problem is more than french has a complex rulebook and keeps a lot of (obsolete) bi-grams or tri-grams with the same pronounciation (ign / gn).

French is easier for most monolingual anglophones because most Anglophones already have a lot more exposure to it before they start learning it. Obviously this will be different if you have a particular interest in Italian culture etc

Are you an iron maiden fan metraton? Cool shirt

In some ways, French pronunciation can be easier than Spanish/Italian pronunciation. As native English speakers, we're used to schwa out the wazoo and nasal vowels sounds. Being extremely strict with vowels can be demanding if you're not used to it. The letter I in particular. It can be difficult at times to force myself to pronounce it 'ee' and not relax so that it rhymes with the I in "sit" or "it."

Im a native spanish speaker but somehow french is very easy in memorizing when its from reading it but impossible to understand hearing it spoken , but italian is so much more easy to understand only thing that makes italian hard is the many many words it has way more than spanish. I really want to become fluent in italian but im having 0 luck 😿😿😿😿😿

Native German and Spanish speaker here. For some time now, I have been casually learning French and more recently also Italian. Out of the two, French is without doubt the more challenging language, mostly due to phonetics. In comparison to most hispanophones, I was already familiar with many of the sounds thanks to German (the R is the same, French U = German Ü, etc.), only the nasals were completely new. And even with this advantage, I find speaking French not that easy. Understanding spoken French is even harder. On the other hand, with Italian I felt right at home very much from the beginning. I could immediately grasp around the half of what was being said. The pronunciation is simply much closer to what I am used to with Spanish, that definitely helps a lot. I feel that there also some more cognates compared to French, take for example maison/casa.

@keithkannenberg7414

8 ай бұрын

According to linguists Italian has higher lexical similarity to French than to Spanish (89% vs. 82% according to Wiki). But then not every pair of words that are lexically similar are mutually intelligible. I'm not a linguist but I'd imagine that the strong differences in phonetics hide a lot of the similarity between French and Italian.

My trip to France this year had my head spinning lol I spoke italian and English Younger cousins french and English Older cousins and my father spoke French Italian and Sicilian And every language was used interchangeably. WW2 really spread us around like shrapnel lol

The same prolem with the over pronounced KH and R, also exist in Hebrew learners. They eitger make a different sound altogether, or pronounce it to harshly.

I am a native German speaker. I had French in school and I am currently studying Italian. French is harder. Screw French spelling 😵‍💫

@tibsky1396

8 ай бұрын

Ironically, French is the most Germanic of the Romance family, and English is the most Latin of the Germanic Family.

I always trill my r's when speaking French - it's not wrong and there are still people in parts of Canada and, obviously, Africa, very few in France though, who pronounce is that way.

Please make a video to see if you can understand Mozarabic. It is a Romance/Arabic language that was born due to the Arab invasion of the Iberian Peninsula.

I think my brain is broken. Did 2 years of French & Latin in High school. Really enjoyed French and even though I'm not confident enough to speak it I can read it to a fairly decent standard due to my hobbies (military history, painting miniatures). Started learning Spanish on Duolingo 4 years ago. I found it so much easier than French. Still not a conversationalist but very happy with my progress. When I watch French & Spanish language TV shows I can follow enough to tell when the English subtitles aren't a literal translation. Now, the broken brain. I grew up in a heavily Italian suburb of Sydney. A week ago I was sitting near some people having a conversation in Italian. Somehow I could understand the basic context of what they were chatting about. I've never formally learnt Italian. Very odd.

First of all, of course all languages are hard and easy at the same time, depending on your own background (own native language, other languages you know, situation you're in, etc..) but, that being said, it seems to me that most people here seem to choose for French is the more difficult one. Let me then argue here that the opposite is true. French is easier for the following reasons : The pronunciation is only a tiny bit more complicated due to the nasal vowels that are quite uncommon in most other European languages. However, a lot of people who think otherwise are actually not talking about the pronunciation but about the spelling. They focus too much on the writing instead of the spoken form. If you don't do that, French is not very different than other European languages. French has less consonant sounds than Italian but, more in line with Germanic languages, has more vowels. 4 of these are nasals so that's a bit difficult but that's all... French, like other romance languages doesn't distinguish between long and short vowels for example (like English and other Germanic languages). It's u-sound is easy for Germanic speakers (except the English). Grammar wise it is easier than all other romance languages because: It has fewer tenses and moods in the spoken form than all others. The main reason for that: spoken French doesn't use the passé simple, the simple past. Instead, like English or other Germanic languages, it basically uses 2 forms for the past, the imparfait (imperfectum) and the passé composé (perfectum). Now compare that to Italian, Spanish or, even worse, Portuguese! Not only are there 3 forms (not talking about he the subjunctive, see later), but it's quite complicated to know when to use which one as well. The conjugation of verbs is way easier in French than in other romance languages. Those who think otherwise, again, confuse spelling with pronunciation. French is partly Germanic in the sense that you need the personal pronouns to figure out which person one is talking about. That is different from other romance languages. The reason for it however is exactly the same as in English : if you don't, almost all persons sound similar! So instead of there being a lot of forms (like in Italian for example), there are just a few. Have a look to the present tense & infinitive of the verb travailler (to work) English : to work, work, works (3 or, if you want, 2 forms) French : *travailler & travaillez (=same sound) *travaille, travailles, travaillent (same sound) *travaillons =... 3 forms! Italian : Lavorare Lavoro Lavori Lavora Lavoriamo Lavorate Lavorano = 7 forms! My point again: people focus way too much on the spelling and therefore think French is very difficult, but, like explained in the video, English has the same "problem". Subjunctive... The uses of the subjunctive in French is far easier than in other romance languages. It's used less in general, it uses less forms in the past and has no future form, and, again, pronunciation wise it also has fewer forms. Again the verb travailler in the present.. Here, Italian is closer with only 4 forms (singular is lavori for all persons). French again has 3. Spanish and Portuguese (from Europe) have 5... French prepositions are a bit more difficult I would say but not that much. All other grammar stuff is pretty much similar to other romance languages. Conclusion : for someone who doesn't speak any romance language, French is the easiest one For speakers of Germanic languages as well cause of the Germanic way of conjugating verbs For English speaker: benefit of 1066😂 For speakers of non European languages : european languages are just as weird and difficult as those outside of it. Chinese grammar is way easier! 😅 For speakers of romance languages other than French : don't focus on the spelling that much!! 😂

@thebenis3157

8 ай бұрын

The one thing I'm gonna point out is that passato remoto, the Italian simple past, is pretty much never used while speaking, just like in French. You only really should be able to recognise it if you're learning Italian, because people in the south are more likely to use it, but that's kind of it

@torrawel

8 ай бұрын

@@thebenis3157 according to my Italian students (I'm teaching Dutch), that's not quite true. They claim that the north uses the perfectum and the south the remoto. I don't know if that's true but you have the same issue with Spanish. In Latin America they use, in general, a lot more the (in)definido than in Spain. What is the correct Spanish? Both I would say. The point with French however is that there isn't such a variety in the official, standard language.

@thebenis3157

8 ай бұрын

@@torrawel It's not quite that simple really. In the north, passato remoto is pretty much used as in French, meaning you're only gonna use it if you're being formal, and even then mostly in writing. In the south, they're more likely to use both, but even then, outside of Sicily, passato prossimo (past perfect) is more prevalent. With that said, my point really is that, if you're learning Italian, you don't need to know how to use passato remoto outside of very formal circumstances, you can get by with just passato prossimo and it's still gonna be correct, you only need to be able to recognise and understand passato remoto, and it will be enough

You should try the corsican 👌

@Chiamami_Capo

8 ай бұрын

Nice italian dialect

In my experience with the two, I found French pronunciation to be much more difficult to work out, and French strikes me as a wordy language--there are lots of bits and pieces that have to be used, but that the language books won't translate.

Fun fact : there are actually more variations to the pronunciation of "E" in French, see "œuf" /œf/ vs "œufs" /ø/

If French were pronounced as it is written, or even better, written as it is pronounced, it would be just as easy as Italian. That being said, I think more people learn French as a L2, plus there are a lot more countries with French as a national language, so finding a French language partner will be easier than finding an Italian one. In my experience though, speaking just a little bit of Italian will bring a very positive response from Italians, whereas not speaking good French will often bring you ridicule and mockery from native French speakers. This will quickly destroy your motivation and will lead many people to give up on learning French.

I’d turn the question in another way : which European language should you learn first if you plan to learn all of them (well maybe not all of them but the major ones), depending on your own native language ? I think there are languages that bridge easier than others, so there should be an order to follow. For example, though my own language French is indeed harder than Italian or even Spanish for English speakers, I kinda feel that it would be easier to learn Italian and Spanish after struggling first with French, when trying to learn French after Italian or Spanish might not be significantly easier…

@itamadrelingua

8 ай бұрын

As someone who started with Italian, I can assure you, it is better to start with Italian and then pass to Spanish and French for multiple reasons: 1. For those who are not familiar with Italian and start to learn French, it is just impossible to figure out the gender of nouns. In French almost all last vowels are silent. So, let's say, the word "fenêtre", is it masculine or feminine? Which article should I put? Is it le fenêtre or la fenêtre?How should I figure it out, as a Ukranian? It is just impossible, you have to memorize the gender for every single word. BUT if you already know Italian then it is easy for you, since it's "finestra" with a very clear final ”a”, which means it is feminine, so it is LA FINESTRA, therefore it has to be ”la fenêtre”, with 99% of possibility. You see, I don't have to memorize genders in like 80% of cases if I speak Italian on a first place. 2. Italian is closer to Latin, so it helps you to memorize entire words in French and even in English. Example: Quanto - Quantità, in French it is not Combienité, but Quantité from quanto. And of course it's quantity, but not ”howmuchity”. And you have plenty of examples like that. But French is extremely hard because of its pronunciation. I started with Italian, then passed to Spanish and it was really easy. So when I decided to study French I was expecting to be able to speak it within a couple of months (since I was able to understand movies with no subtitles in both Italian and Spanish), but I was so wrong. It took me two years to get ready to speak French. So I can agree, it is still difficult even after Italian but I think without Italian it would have been way harder

@yannsalmon2988

8 ай бұрын

@@itamadrelinguaSorry our genders and pronunciation gave you such a hard time. Now that you know those three languages, do you think you understand how their inner works function, how they each deviated from Latin ? Do you feel that you can kinda guess from the word in Italian, for example, what it might sound like in French or Spanish ? What new language with this base of Ukrainian, English, Italian, Spanish and French seems to you to be probably the easiest to learn ? Portuguese ?

@itamadrelingua

8 ай бұрын

@@yannsalmon2988 oh, I think this is actually a tricky thing, to guess the pronunciation of the word based on another language. Of course I always try to trick the system like that but it doesn't always work 😂. You can guess a lot of words without even knowing them, like, sabbia - sable. But then you can try with nebbia - neble. And NEBLE just doesn't exist, it is ''brouillard'', so it is easy to get confused or misunderstood, but at least this system often works. I think Portuguese would be the easiest one for me, but I have to focus on English at the moment.

@yannsalmon2988

8 ай бұрын

⁠@@itamadrelinguaWell the English seems to be going great 👍 NEBLE is not an existing French word but « nébuleux » is. It means : confusing, imprecise, mysterious, so something kind of « foggy ». So even if the Italian word roughly turned into French doesn’t work as a direct translation, you can still find a corresponding word in the French vocabulary. This is also true the other way around, like « fermer » (to close) is translated « chiudere » in Italian, but the verb « fermare » still exists in Italian in the sense « to stop » which can be seen as an interpretation of closing something.

@Chiamami_Capo

8 ай бұрын

Just learn some african dialect or arab if you want to be understood in France

Im trying to teach myself latin, and i feel like italian is far closer than french, to its mother tongue.

Warning: long winded comment! 😊 I'm completely trilingual in a weird combination of languages: Hungarian, Hebrew and American English, at the native level, with literary, scientific and older variations and vocabularies of these languages, I read, write and translate from to either of these. My fourth language is Arabic, (2 dialects, read & write) which I haven't used for speaking for a long time, so I lost some of the fluency, but not the comprehension. As a child, as soon as I learned to read and write, in two languages, my mother at my request started to teach me Italian, especially how to read, as her idea was that if I read correctly, I'd be able to learn the words easier. She was not Italian, but loved the language so much that even as a school girl she took private lessons with conversation and literature as part of the curriculum. As a young adult she even wrote poetry in Italian. I caught that love of Italian from her . I never had the opportunity/time to study Italian, but kept up practicing reading and picked up more and more vocabulary as the years went by. I also got very interested, like you @Metatron in the other Romance languages and as a hobby tried to read correctly in every one of them, trying to figure out the patterns that could point me to the direction of identifying similar words in these languages. I also started to read Classical Latin and listen to the well-known Luke Ranieri, discovering a great resource. I love the sound of Classical Latin! Luke mentioned that the Classical Latin speakers with the best pronounciation are Hungarian speakers. I'm completely with you listening to dialects and languages to see to what degree you can understand them, and I enjoy every minute of that series of the videos. One more comment: as a Hungarian speaker I don't find any difficulties reproducing the Italian vowels correctly, and the doubling of consonants almost comes naturally to me. The "r"s are also natural. Nowadays I'm able to listen to some presentations and lectures about history in Italian, and I understand most of it. It may be somewhat genetic, but my DNA from the middle ages has a lot of Tuscany... 😊 (I know, several dialects there...). I'm also doing the same with the Germanic languages. I wish I went to study languages and linguistics in college instead of Engineering.

@historyandmusic8646

8 ай бұрын

וואו, אלה בדיוק שלושת השפות שסבא שלי יודע. בדיוק היום הוא סיפר לי שהשפה ההונגרית היא מאתגרת ללמוד בגלל שיש בה הרבה צלילים שאין בשפות אחרות. זאת שפה מאוד מעניינת שהייתי לומדת אם הייתה לי את הסבלנות

Italian rulez!

English has borrowed a lot of french . The " zuchinni " example is just a recent important to Anglo-American due to the influence of italian immigrant. Fun fact many Americans are less in contact with British english that even the world " lorry" they would not understand the meaning .

I’d say French is also pronounced how it’s written (unlike English), it’s just you need to learn all the letter combinations for different sounds. (Au=aux=eau=eaux=o) Once you know those and the concept of elision, the pronunciation is actually much easier than, say, English. But, Yeah, Italian wins here for pronunciation ease.

@reezlaw

8 ай бұрын

There is a factor called phonetic transparency and French has very little of that, this is what people mean when they say a language is not "pronounced as it is written". French is objectively much more phonetically opaque than Italian

@epic8923

8 ай бұрын

What are you even talking about? French is one of the most inaccurate phonetic languages of Europe, the examples you gave showcase that inaccuracy pretty well. For me spoken french and written french are basically 2 different languages since lots of consonants and vowels are silent or have different sounds from what you'd expect them to do, making it extremely difficult to know how to write something down when it is spoken. For example if someone says "o" to me what variation of au, aux, eau, eaux am i supposed to use? My only option is guessing which one to use since there's no distinction between each word when spoken and that's it.

@XxMoixX011

8 ай бұрын

@@epic8923 French is consistent. You just have to learn the combinations. au = o. This never changes for example. When it comes to speaking, yuo just have to be logical and pay attention to the grammar. If I say "je bois de l'eau" this can never be "o" or "au" or "haut" or wtv cos that would be stupid and illogical.

@epic8923

8 ай бұрын

@@XxMoixX011 I'm not talking about consistency or grammar, im talking about how french in a spoken form is very different from it's written form making hard to write down whatever someone says to you if you're not a french native or someone who's studied french intensely for years. I've got 3 years of french and still struggle tremendously to decode spoken french to its written format, it is brutally difficult.

@ericscavetta2311

8 ай бұрын

@@epic8923 What I am focusing on in my comment is that it is consistently pronounced, provided you know the letter combinations. This is similar to Irish (which looks very disconnected, but actually it is consistent once you understand the complex mapping of clusters of letters). This is in contrast to English (or Tibetan or Thai), where there is little consistency: bough (ow), cough (off), through (oo), rough (uff), read/lead (ed or eed). But, like I said, I totally agree that Italian (and even more so, languages like Spanish, Haitian Creole, and Indonesian) are written much more phonetically (letter for letter). As a native English speaker from North America, I learned French first, and it made learning Italian & Spanish so much easier and refreshing to get to a basic comprehension level quickly.

In Belgium French and Dutch is spoken (also a bit German). Not only French. Actually there are more people who speak Dutch than French.

For your question in the end, trick question, I already learned both. Native spanish speaker.

French. Hands down. Any language where WYSUWYG is by default easier than those that are not.

I pick both

For an English speaker Spanish is easiest, French is hardest. Italian and Portuguese lie in between. About Romanian I can't say.

French is way WAY harder. The sounds are just entirely foreign and different from almost all other European languages. I could fully master pronunciation of Italian, Swedish, Polish and Hungarian in the time it would take me to learn how to properly gargle the French "r" without choking on my tongue. Grammatically, Italian and French are about the same, but pronunciation isn't even comparable. Consequently, understanding spoken French is harder too.

I’m a 70 year old American. I want to learn both French and Italian. I also want to learn Spanish. I think I’ll start with Spanish because there are a lot more people where I live (Washington State) who speak Spanish as a first or only language than either French or Italian. I anticipate that French might be a little easier because I took three years of French in high school, although I must admit, I didn’t really learn much. I did take one year of Spanish but I learned even less there. Often the teacher would ask me a question in Spanish and although I understood the question, I would answer in French without even thinking about it. The teacher, who also taught French would remind me that this is not a French class. I could read and understand French and Spanish more easily than I could form a sentence. Both my French and Spanish teachers told me that my pronunciation was excellent but I needed to work on grammar.

Ok so my only experience trying to learn these two languages, is Duolingo (my only goal is to understand more words). Both are much harder than Spanish. But French syntax and spelling is effed up.

French has many words with very similar pronunciation within it, which makes the listening and understanding of it quite challenging for me