Disclaimer: full fluency, no studying required, but knowledge of the written language is not included.
If I was a young man again, Italian. Because aside from French, it does the most for ladies; especially those that don’t understand the language.
At my current age, Chinese. Because it will come in the most useful for WWIII. After all, when China finally invades Taiwan, western powers are going to go all racist again with internment camps to hold visibly ethnic people, and not all of them will know English well. They will need translator advocates.
compared to not learning written Italian (like you 😜), not learning written Chinese seems kinda worthless. ofc that’s an exaggeration but the written part is the hardest part!! and the best part
Would knowing the spoken language make learning the written side easier? Or does it likely depend on the language?
depends on the orthography. I find Chinese much harder to read than Italian. part of that is because of me, and part of that is because of how their writing systems are designed.
so I think you’d be getting a better “deal” out of Chinese if you could magically learn the writing too. but without that, well… students pour thousands of hours into learning them, and I’ll still have to do that too
Italian i can just bibbity bop my way to the future, hello see ya later
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.
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.
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.
Celestial.
Probaly Jomon (i.e. whatever was spoken by some of the first people to inhabit Japan).
