Will knowing how to speak Spanish help me learn Italian faster?

I grew up speaking both Italian and English, and then I went on to study Italian in high school plus a semester of college. When I started volunteering in the South Bronx, everything around me was in Spanish... people talking, signs, magazines, food labels... everything. I could pretty much understand it all because it was so similar.

Then I decided to ask the kids at the youth program I was volunteering with to teach me Spanish. I thought it would be so easy. Ha!

Every sentence they tried to teach me came out of my mouth in half Spanish, half Italian, and 100% with an Italian accent. We all laughed so hard. Granted, when I took a semester of Spanish in college, I had it easy because it was similar and I knew how everything worked.

On tests, if I forgot an answer, I could write it in Italian and "Spanish-ify" it and usually get it right. So it goes both ways. You'll recognize words and already know a good part of how the language works, but they're so similar that you may end up like me... bouncing back and forth between the two in one sentence, and mixing up the accents.

Yes. They are both Latin-derived Romance languages. Even if they weren't, learning a language is a good way to learn how languages work, which makes it easier to learn more languages - even if they are dissimilar languages, such as French and German.

I've been told does help quite a bit because, both being Romance languages with Latin roots, they have a lot of similarities, especially in vocabulary.

I took Spanish in high school and Italian in college, and it was much easier, especially for the vocabulary. The grammar also has some similarities, since in Italian, nouns have gender, and conjugations follow similar patterns in some cases. (As would be expected since they are both romance languages).

To give you an idea, here are some vocab words that are similar but not exactly the same. If it is easy for you to see the connection, then you will have a much easier time with learning Italian vocabulary (the only trick is to not get the two languages confused! ) Spanish Italian por favor per favore escuela scuola (Spanish tends to add initial "e"s) el libro il libro me llamo mi chiamo bien bene.

Yes it will. It is very easy for us Spanish speakers. Italians also understand Spanish without much effort.

If you can, learn both languages.

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