Learn Italian Through Spanish

This is one of the coolest language learning hacks I just learned. If you already know how to speak Spanish well, then you will notice that other Romance languages, like Italian, are very similar. In this post, I’ll show you a technique to supercharge your language learning by learning Italian through Spanish.

I just finished the book Fluent in 3 Months and Benny said something that totally changed my perspective on language learning. Why not learn Italian as if I only spoke Spanish?

I’ve been exposed to Italian through my family, travel, and TV and, since I already know Spanish, it’s impossible not to notice that a lot of words and phrases sound so similar to Spanish. Spanish and Italian are both Romance languages so it’s not surprising that there are so many similarities between both languages. English, for what it’s worth, is considered a Germanic language, even though there are a lot of Latin derived words.

Benefits of Learning Italian Through Spanish

1. Spanish and Italian are much more similar than English to Italian. There are a ton of words that you can infer the meaning of because they are almost identical to Spanish. For example, the word for please in Spanish is por favor and, in Italian, it’s per favore.
2. Work on learning two languages simultaneously. While learning Italian, I can also be exposed to Spanish and continue learning the language.

Setting up Duolingo

You can give my approach a try for free using Duolingo.

On Duolingo, you can easily do this by saying you want to learn Italian and indicating that you speak Spanish. I set this up in a desktop browser as I couldn’t find it easily in the app.

Now once you start taking lessons, your translations will be in Spanish!

Exactly How Similar are Spanish and Italian?

Full disclosure that this section will get technical. There are a ton of angles one could use to approach this question. I am specifically going to focus on individual words. To start, let’s look at the most common words in English, Spanish, and Italian.

Comparing the 1,000 Most Common Words

If you know the 1,000 most common words in a language, then you can understand about 80% of a verbal conversation (Hwang, 1989; Hirsh and Nation, 1992; Sutarsyah, Nation and Kennedy, 1994). This is another great learning hack – focusing on the most common words will give you a fast track to a conversation. Anyways, to get that list, I used this site – https://1000mostcommonwords.com/1000-most-common-italian-words/

Levenshtein Distance

The Levenshtein distance is a way to measure how different two words are from each other. In the context of this post, gracias and grazie have a Levenshtein distance of 3. This is because there are 3 changes that have to occur to turn gracias into grazie:

1. gracias > grazias
2. gracias > grazies
3. grazies > grazie

In Python, you would just use the nltk package:

import nltk
nltk.edit_distance("gracias", "grazie")
>>3

What I did next, combine the English, Spanish, and Italian lists into one list to compare the same word. Then I can run the Levenshtein function on Spanish to Italian and English to Italian. Finally, I can bucket each word into the Levenshtein distance and get a count.

Here is what I found:

What’s interesting is that 100 words (10%) are exactly the same in Italian and Spanish. It’s also interesting to note that since the words are fairly short, the distances between them are not huge. The largest distance was 13. In case you were curious, that word is especially which translates to particolarmente in Italian.

You’ll also notice that the chart peaks at 1 then decreases for Italian and Spanish. Whereas with Italian and English, the chart increases, peaking at a distance of 4 words then decreasing.

Final Thoughts – Why Learn a Third Language?

Making the leap to learn a third language can be a challenging decision to make. The two biggest things are the time commitment to learning the third language and the opportunity cost. I think like an economist so I am always measuring my trade-offs. By focusing on Italian, I am not able to focus on Spanish. I could just stick with being bilingual and aim for mastery in Spanish. However, I have been eager to learn Italian because of my heritage and because I hope to travel to Italy in the near future. Leveraging Spanish to learn Italian was an interesting way to tackle two languages at once.

Thanks for reading!