If you could learn the spoken language instantly, which would you pick?

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

41 comments

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.

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- God damn it lol
  
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  Living la vida loca
  
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- That’s hilarious.
  
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- came here to point that out as well lol
  
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- Could you choose Italian and become your countrys best linguist by objectively being twice as good at the language as any other native speaker? Or does it turn into Vulgar latin?
  
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Chinese because Italian would be a lot easier to learn on my own.

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Chooses Chinese:

Monkey's paw curls

Congratulations, you learned the Min dialect of Chinese!
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- '3. You unlearned all other languages
  
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Chinese. Not for any high-minded reason, just to have access to a whole new culture of music, TV, movies, etc.

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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.

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- 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
  
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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.

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Italian, so i could read The Name of the Rose in original

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

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- 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.
  
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  I've been and thought it was splendid.
  
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- 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.
  
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  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.
  
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  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.
  
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Italian is “La vita é bella”. This is Spanish. ಠᴗಠ

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Chinese. Already know multiple Indo-European languages. Would be cool to know other language families, I only speak languages from two right now.

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

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Probably Chinese (Mandarin). More people speak it so it would be more useful.

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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,

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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

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中文

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Chinese simply by the fact that more people in the world speak Chinese. Plus, I'd be able to bettwr understand my favorite singer Jam Hsiao.

I don't know enough about the Italian language, any pop culture, or have enough interest in Italy to wanna be fluent in Italian.

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Being fluent in English and native Spanish, my first choice would be Chinese, because it opens your reach to another half of the world. But a language I would really like to learn is Japanese.

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Kind of an easy question for me.

I've studied Italian before and while I dropped it pretty early, of the language classes I took I found it pretty comfortable to learn. If I wanted to become fluent I feel confident I could. I've actually been debating whether to take it or a French course as a hobby lately.

With Chinese I've had difficulty even differentiating words or learning basic phrases from friends who speak it. I don't think I could become fluent even if I dedicated myself. Getting it by magic is the only way I'm going to learn it. It's also by far the more useful of the two languages.

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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

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- Would knowing the spoken language make learning the written side easier? Or does it likely depend on the language?
  
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  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
  
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Going by the picture, each means successfully losing a shit ton of weight, so I’m down with either

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I’m from the future. Go to China.

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Definitely Chinese preferably Mandarin since I already know some.

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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.

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Chinese. I go to a college with a lot of Chinese international students so it’d be cool to be able to talk to them in Chinese

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Celestial.

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Probaly Jomon (i.e. whatever was spoken by some of the first people to inhabit Japan).

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