Oneironaut, thanks for not getting mad. I was fearing some kind of "wtf r u talking about i understand both perfectly their so similar fuck you" kind of response from some here who have made the claim I criticized, but it's good to see that you're more decent than that.

You should have told us up front you're a "language geek." I can definitely see how in your case, with your kind of knowledge, jumping back and forth around languages becomes easier. What I am sick of is people who know neither Italian nor Spanish, listen to both of them being spoken, have no fucking idea what is being said in either case, but immediately judge them both to be oh so identical simply because the cadence and delivery sounds somewhat the same (which they never do with French and Italian, which we've agreed are more closely linked together, since these two languages don't sound as similar). Or they might look at a few Spanish words, notice that they're spelled just like their Italian counterparts with perhaps an extra 's' at the end, and rashly build their case on that.

If I see/read a commercial/advertisement about a Mexican restaurant or something that is actually in Spanish, I might pick up on the gist of it, but that's only because since I know what it's about, I am quicker to allocate the words and their relevance, and context clues help me out on the rest of it. This is what happens to a lot of people who go on to assume that learning Italian means an automatic mastery of Spanish and viceversa. But if a Spaniard walks up to me and just starts talking in Spanish, and I have no clue what the context is, I am not going to understand much, if anything. The same holds true for if an Italian were to start yapping to a Spaniard. And I've always been very skeptical of those who claim this isn't so, and that they can juggle both interchangeably just because they're okay at one of them.

Latin, of course, is key in all of this. People ask, "whats the fucking point of learning latin no one speaks it lol!" without knowing that if you can master Latin and all its workings, your ease at learning any romance language in the future is upped big time. My mother actually teaches Latin at the university level, and she's always on my ass that I should learn it. I'd like to, and I think I might start taking it next year. If I had stayed in Italy and gone through high school there, it would have been, along with Greek, part of the normal curriculum.

Not so fast, anti-Americans wherever you are. Just because they're part of the curriculum doesn't mean that Italian students are all too ecstatic about learning them, or that they make a particular effort to remember the material once out of high school. I care to specify this because I don't want to inspire any "omg european schools are so much better were so fucking stupid in america" kind of hateful responses.
Gigliozzi Reviewed by Gigliozzi on . How many languages ? Parliamo Burdseye as they say! This months National Geographic carried an article that states that one in three of people using the net log on in English. How many if any other languages do you speak, fluently or otherwise. I can get by in German, I am fluent in local Scottish dialect but thats it I'm afraid. National Geographic is also online nationalgeographic.com Rating: 5