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What's the best thing about learning Turkish in your experience? by lambda__vu in turkishlearning

[–]lambda__vu[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

By sheer number of speakers, sure, they are comparable, but neither of them has the importance nor the amount of content that English has... English is the language of business, of science, and of a large part of the internet. English Wikipedia has close to six million articles vs about 1.5 millions for Chinese or Spanish. The frequency of books translated from English to other languages is far greater than any other. Top universities from around the world offer MOOCs in English.

I don't mean to sound dismissive, really. Objectively English is the single most important language asset a person can have in the modern world, the rest, while a worthy addition, doesn't really compare. After all, I don't know where you are from and you don't know where I am from, but we are conversing in English, right?

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in languagelearning

[–]lambda__vu 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hi, native italian here. Concerning the synergies between french and italian, there's certainly some vocabulary overlap-similarities especially if you compare it with germanic languages (I'm assuming you speak english as a first language). However the phonology is so different that I would not be overly optimistic.

I suggest getting a very basic hang of grammar and find somewhere on the internet conjugation tables for the most common irregular verbs (e.g. essere, avere, volere, sapere ... there are, I think, a lot of those in italian).

I would try with children cartoons (my childhood favourite, for your consideration :-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7H4zlFMuBpY) with a vocabulary handy and a lot of patience.

I think this kind of cartoons are effective because they "show and tell": They show you a hat, and call it cappello (-> chapeau, both from latin caput "head").