<p>I've studied French for 3 years in highschool, Latin for 2 years in highschool, and started Italian in college and have completed 4 semesters with plans to do a minor. Italian is always my favorite class, and the one class that I pencil in as an A every semester.</p>
<p>Pronunciation: It's easier to get a good accent than in Spansh or French. </p>
<p>Orthography: You'll learn 3 rules for writing the first day and after that, if you hear a word you can spell it perfectly.</p>
<p>Vocabulary: "Making up" Italian words is easy. There's thousands upon thousands of cognates with stead-fast translation rules - the word for velocity is velocit</p>
<p>i'm sure any language is easy if you move to the country and take 6 hours a day of intensive immersion courses...we're talking about 3 hours a week of classes.</p>
<p>Ooh, Italian my favorite. The fastest way to learn Italian is to move to Italy. Anyway, I've found that if you've got a background in any romantic languages Italian isn't that difficult to learn. From what I've observed it's easier to pick up after you know Spanish than French, though. </p>
<p>italian words look so....tricky. french is so easy to absorb cuz it feels like english; spanish is also pretty easy to absorb, but quite tiresome, but italian...</p>
<p>but italian is supposed to be the closest to latin vocabulary-wise. is the subjunctive important in italian...how many conjugations are there??</p>
<p>the subjunctive is the bane of my existence in italian. while off the top of my head i can't think of how many tenses, there are probably at least 10 or so which get used with regularity.</p>
<p>Yeah, I find the simple tenses (pretty much the ones that I have cause to use regularly) pretty easy to remember. But anytime I need the congiuntivo (subjunctive), I have to look it up again. Even then, though, they're fairly easy to remember. It's just that I never use them to speak of.</p>
<p>And, out of curiosity, Chocoman, what are the three rules for spelling Italian words? I feel like I probably do it instinctively, but I don't know the official rules.</p>
<p>Just to put my two cents in. I am in my fifth year of High School Italian, and this year I started taking a basic spanish class. Spanish may be more important but if you take italian, spanish is pretty easy to understand. many ofthe words, verbs and other phrases are practically the same. So do whatever you want.</p>
<p>molto...hmm..that means very....that reminds me, italian is an important language when it comes to music: piano, violin, adagio, allegro, modereto, concerto, do re mi fa so...,etc.</p>
<p>So the language is pretty, culture-filled, and easy....makes me want to take it! But I don't know if I can abandon my precious ideograms-It's so much fun being able to write and know other people have no clue what I've said.</p>
<p><em>reads bottom paragraph while remarking on sauron's slow typing</em></p>
<p>Something about, lemonade difficult, of, manuever, famous people, announce that memo three invest to the question international relations. But the thing is I can guess by guesswork with english pronounciation of letters. Now with a foreign script, unless you've learned the letters-nothing! 国際関係<br>
(こくさいかんけい) Try guessing how what that is? ("International relations)</p>
<p>
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I'm thinking about getting a book or two to try to pick up the language over the summer; do you think I could acquire proficiency in that period?
[/quote]
It depends by what you mean by "proficiency". Pass written tests? Maybe, if you're good at memorizing vocabulary and remembering grammar rules. Tests are not language-at-speed, so given enough time to puzzle it out you can recall the words you need, figure out the right conjugation, get the articles to agree in number and sex, etc.</p>
<p>But if you mean actually become someone who could be considered fluent in Italian, my guess is no. First of all, without hearing it spoken your english translation system is going to cause you to not recognize the words you're reading when you hear them spoken. And the lack of interactive practice is going to make it difficult to hold a real conversation; a book is one-way communication, text to you and it doesn't care if you take a long time to comprehend each sentence. Real-world speakers are seldom as accomodating.</p>
<p>The underlying reason is that language is localized in the brain. By not experiencing all modalities (speaking, reading, hearing) you're not training all the spots. Not training is largely like training but then damaging. If you damage Broca's area in someone then they understand but have great difficulty speaking. Damage Wernicke's area and they speak ok but have great trouble understanding what others are saying. As a more pragmatic example, in the 20's thru the 60's in this country many immigrants wanted their kids to be fully "American" so even though they'd speak their native tongue at home they prohibited the kids from speaking in it. As a result I've met older adults who can understant their parents native tongue perfectly well, but can't speak in it.</p>