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

  • Nerd02
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    6210 months ago

    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.

  • Bipta
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    2110 months ago

    Chooses Chinese:

    1. Monkey’s paw curls
    2. Congratulations, you learned the Min dialect of Chinese!
  • @bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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    1310 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.

  • LucasWaffyWaf
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    1310 months ago

    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.

    • @Baguette@lemmy.ml
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      310 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

  • @spittingimage@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

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

    • Nominel
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      110 months ago

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

  • @TheControlled@lemmy.world
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    710 months ago

    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.

    • @Rakonat@lemmy.world
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      410 months ago

      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.

    • @RBWells@lemmy.world
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      110 months ago

      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.

      • Gnome Kat
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        110 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.

      • @TheControlled@lemmy.world
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        110 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.

  • Annoyed_🦀 A
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    510 months ago

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

  • @odium@programming.dev
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    10 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.

  • tygerprints
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    510 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.

  • BarqsHasBite
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    10 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,

  • BiggestBulb
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    410 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