Spanish VS Italian: Which is Harder?
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- Опубликовано: 25 июн 2024
- The Italian Wikipedia (Italian: Wikipedia in italiano) is the Italian-language edition of Wikipedia. This edition was created on May 11, 2001,[1] and first edited on June 11, 2001. As of July 31, 2023, it has 1,820,654 articles and more than 2,409,352 registered accounts.[2] It is the 9th-largest Wikipedia by the number of articles (after the English, Swedish, German, Dutch, French, Cebuano, Russian, and Spanish editions).[3]
History
As early as March 2001, Jimmy Wales, the creator and co-founder of the original English language Wikipedia, had proposed the creation of parallel Wikipedia projects in other languages.[4] The Italian-language version was among the first ones to be created, in May 2001. The original URL was italian.wikipedia.com, while the standardized ISO 639 address it.wikipedia.com became active a few days later.[5] Afterwards, Wikipedia sites switched their domains from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org. The very first pages (circa five hundred) were simply untranslated copies from the English-language Wikipedia; the first edits were made from June 11, 2001, onwards.
In 2007, the Italian Wikipedia adopted an Exemption Doctrine Policy, shared with other Wikipedias. In the same year, on 21 May, there were more than 300,000 entries. On January 22, 2008, the entries were 400,000; on October 3, they were 500,000. The number of users had reached 250,000.
In 2009 the Italian Wikipedia was awarded the Premiolino, the oldest and most prestigious Italian journalism prize, in the new media category.
On June 22, 2010, it passed 700,000 articles (Robie House - 700,000th article). On September 28, 2010, the Italian Wikipedia overtook the Polish Wikipedia, becoming the 4th largest edition, though in October 2010 the numbers on both Wikipedias were very close, and as of 2011 the Polish Wikipedia was in the lead again.[9] On May 12, 2011, it passed 800,000 articles. On the same day, it overtook the Polish Wikipedia. On March 12, 2012, it passed 900,000 articles. On January 22, 2013, it passed 1,000,000 articles.
Spanish (español or idioma español), or Castilian[a] (castellano), is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from colloquial Latin spoken on the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. Today, it is a global language with about 486 million native speakers, mainly in the Americas and Spain.[1] Spanish is the official language of 20 countries. It is the world's second-most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese;[5][6] the world's fourth-most spoken language overall after English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu); and the world's most widely spoken Romance language. The country with the largest population of native Spanish speakers is Mexico.[7]
Spanish is part of the Ibero-Romance group of languages, which evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in Iberia after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. The oldest Latin texts with traces of Spanish come from mid-northern Iberia in the 9th century,[8] and the first systematic written use of the language happened in Toledo, a prominent city of the Kingdom of Castile, in the 13th century. Spanish colonialism in the early modern period spurred on the introduction of the language to overseas locations, most notably to the Americas.[9]
As a Romance language, Spanish is a descendant of Latin, and has one of the smaller degrees of difference from it (about 20%) alongside Sardinian and Italian.[10] Around 75% of modern Spanish vocabulary is derived from Latin, including Latin borrowings from Ancient Greek.[11][12] Alongside English and French, it is also one of the most taught foreign languages throughout the world.[13] Spanish does not feature prominently as a scientific language; however, it is better represented in areas like humanities and social sciences.[14] Spanish is also the third most used language on internet websites after English and Chinese.[15]
Spanish is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, and it is also used as an official language by the European Union, Organization of American States, Union of South American Nations, Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, African Union and many other international organizations
#italianlanguage #spanishlanguage #vs
![Italian vs Spanish: which one is harder? [Learn Italian, with subs]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/aZa34xS0m94/mqdefault.jpg)
Judging by what foreign students learning both languages tell me, I'm glad that Italian and Spanish were my two native languages, though I think Italian is the hardest of the two.
Do you speak Rioplatense Spanish? If not, can you understand it with 100% intelligibility? Also, do you eat spaghetti tacos?
@@MrAllmightyCornholioz Rioplatense Spanish is not a different language, it's perfectly intelligible, excepting some idiomatic stuff like it happens everywhere.
Italian has definetely the harder grammar, especially verb conjugations.
@@MrAllmightyCornholioz XDDDDDDDDD che boludo
@@cahallo5964 Why do people classify the varieties of Spanish by regions? I speak the quote on quote "Andean" variety from Bogotá, but we sound so different from how someone from Medellín or Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru would sound like. We all understand each other, but when we get to the cultural and slang side of things we literally cannot understand each other.
Mexican here, 15 years ago I went to bar in Rome. After a couple of beers I had a conversation with some italians. Alcohol helps in mutually inteligibility
7:30 As a native Italian speaker (I'm from Rome), I'm pretty sure that "Il televisore" is used to refer to the device itself while "la televisione" is used to refer to the programs broadcast on it
Sì è come hai spiegato tu 😊
Is this regional? Many years ago I went to Italy with my Italian grandmother and she told me it was la televisione, but one of the locals I made friends with corrected me and said it's "television." She pronounced it the same as televisione just without the "e" sound at the end.
@@chriswilson1853 In Italian we always pronounce every character of every word. I know some people in the north are used to cut the last vocal but I don’t know well how it works because it is something regional. In general it is “televisore” o “televisione”.
Same in Spanish. I have always referred to the object as "el televisor" and to "la televisión" as the medium. Though colloquially people will frequently use "La tele" to refer to both. So it makes sense that it would be similar in Italian.
En español usamos "EL televisor" (masculino) para el aparato y "LA televisión" (femenino) para el contenido.
As a Romanian that speaks Italian but also has a limited knowledge of Spanish, I managed quite well to make myself understood as a tourist in Spain speaking a mixture of Spanish and Italian. Both languages seem very similar to me. Even in Portugal I managed to get along by using some basic Italian.
I speak Spanish and French and I can get the gist of spoken Romanian. I find Romanian to be closer to Spanish than either French or Italian.
As a spanish native speaker I can tell you that you can go by with Italian quite easily, as long as you speak it slowly. That's one of the beauties between both languages, we can understand each other for the most part.
The second of the two that you learn is the hardest, when the two languages are similiar. I learnt Italian first and went to university in Italy. Learning Spanish and living in Latin America, I constantly get confused with Italian
@@tahiti1 my Italian teacher used to tell us that for us Romance speakers, we at first learn Italian very fast, but at a certain moment we start to make confusions between languages due to similarity.
I honestly like Romanian the most out of all the romance language, sounds cool and I speak Spanish, although it doesn't quite make sense to me when listening, but I can understand a little bit
Actually in Spanish also exists the doublet "el televisor" and "la televisión", which refering to the device is more a matter of local dialect (I would say that at least in Latin America "televisión" is more common), but the broadcasting per se is always refered as "la televisión". Also, it can be shortened colloquially as "la tele", but I've never heard "el tele". And the article thing before names is made in colloquial Spanish all the time, it's just the formal "rules" that prescribe against it.
As a native Spanish-speaker and with my modest knowledge of Italian (I mean, I can read it perfectly and somewhat understand it when I hear it, but not speaking it at all), I would say that grammatically Italian is objectively harder than Spanish -but, as you say, not so much harder- because it retains a pair of features lost in modern Spanish (although sometimes still present in Early Modern Spanish: the alternation of "essere" and "avere" as auxiliaries for the past tense, for example, or the gender concordance with the participle: Italian "ti ha chiamato/chiamata, vs Spanish "me ha llamado" regardless of gender. Italian "egli é partito" & "ella é partita" vs Spanish "él/ella ha partido"). But I would say that Spanish should be harder vocabulary-wise, if only because of the wider distribution (I mean, for example, you know the standard word for "popcorn", wich is "palomitas de maíz" but you may never call it like that, you call it by the local name while being somewhat aware that in other places it is called different: "rosetas", "pochoclo", "crispetas", etc.).
In general, I agree with you. Excellent video as always. (not excellent because I agree, tho, hahaha.)
Yes, "el televisor" is quite common in Spanish to say "the television set". But it may be slightly old fashioned to say nowadays.
En México he escuchado 'el tele de torax' para designar 'la radiografía de torax'.
In italian we also shorten "la televisione" with "la tv" (pron: tivú) sometimes and it's always feminine.
Actually it's similar in Italian. La televisione refers to broadcasting but is also used to refer to the device through which the broadcasting is transmitted (as in the television set). However, il televisore refers only to the device. We also abbreviate it to "la tele" or la tv. I've never heard "il tele" but I have heard il tv (not as common) but only when referring to the television set (the device and not the broadcast).
Pretty the same in polish. We have "telewizor" (m.) - the device and "telewizja" (f.) - broadcasting service. Sometimes people use the word for device to describe the broadcasting service but that's extremely rare.
Spanish and Italian are 82% similar. I speak both Spanish and Italian. Sometimes I listen to Italian and have to stop and think am I listening to Spanish or Italian.
As a native English speaker having learned both Italian and Spanish to a high level, I'd say Spanish is a bit harder for English speakers. A few reasons:
-Lexically, Italian shares a bit (really only a bit) more vocab with English, simply because most romance vocab borrowed into English is from French, and French and Italian are lexically closer than French and Spanish. There also seems to be more words and expressions that can be translated literally between English and Italian than between English and Spanish (e.g. 'to become').
-In Italian, you can get away with not using the passato remoto in speech. In Spanish you really need to be able to actively produce the preterite (equivalent forms to Italian passato remoto), the perfect (equivalent to passato prossimo) and the imperfect (same as Italian).
-The subjunctive in Italian should be learned if you want to speak in a standard way, but it's mostly superfluous and you can communicate without it. It's basically just an extra set of forms that need to be used in a fairly straightforward way in some contexts. In Spanish you cannot communicate fully without the subjunctive. For instance, at one point I, intending the phrase "Let me know when you do it", said to a Spaniard "dime cuando lo haces" which in reality means "tell me when it is that you do it", as opposed to "dime cuando lo hagas" which communicates the intended meaning. Spanish also doesn't merge the 3rd person plural subjunctive with the indicative like Italiam meaning you have to distinguish "decimos" (we say) from "digamos" (let's say). It also uses the subjunctive for the negative imperative, while Italian just uses the infinitive.
Obviously you can point to things that are harder about Italian... the passato prossimo is a little more annoying to form than the Spanish perfect with two auxiliary verbs and more irregular participles... but there are also other things I didn't mention above in Spanish, like stressed/unstressed vowel deformations.
I would say Italian is about 20% harder than Spanish, mainly because of pronouns like "ci", for which there's no direct equivalent in Spanish, and exceptions to direct articles like lo, l', gli, etc. and contractions like "ai", and strange words like glieli which are hard to figure out how use. More variants mean more rules.
@@jtinalexandria Honestly, I think those little things have a much smaller impact than the other stuff I mentioned, but that's just my experience learning both languages :-)
Interesting. I spoke English and French before learning Spanish so my reaction to the beginning of your post was that you were so wrong, but then I remembered I spoke French, lol. The concept of multiple conjugations was already extremely normal for me so I found Spanish to be almost so easy I'd call it baby's first language. Really the hardest part for me by far was the strict vowel pronunciation and how my English ears could SWEAR that the same speaker would alternate their vowel sounds, but they really don't. An excellent song to showcase this is "efectos vocales" by Nach.
@@smeegy1 Have you studied Italian? Because the grammar of French and Italian is *extremely* similar.
@@Glossologia not at all, though I do know the lexical similarity is like 85 percent or something crazy.
As a native spanish speaker I use both "el televisor" and "la televisión", but they don't mean exactly the same.
Televisor is the device, whereas televisión is both the device and the broadcasting
So I could say "prende/enciende (turn on) el televisor para ver (to see) la televisión". But I could also say "prende (turn on) la televisión".
Me ganó, compadre. Aunque aquí la versión femenina para referirse al dispositivo siempre es acortada "la tele"
I think it might be the same distinction in Italian. It is definitely also in French beween "télévision" and "téléviseur".
@@theguyfromsaturn In Catalan it is too, so it must be a generalized thing in all romance languages
Confirm it's the same in Romanian
Yes, in Italian "televisione" is the transmission, the images you watch on TV, and "televisore" is the device.
Raf got confused for a second, happens to the best.
I suspect that "el televisor" in Spanish, is only the device like it is for us, in Italian.
The misunderstanding might be about "guardare la televisione" nobody watches "il televisore" it would mean you are watching the device, not the images, so most people almost never even hear "il televisore" because if you mention it it's because you were actually watching TV "la televisione".
But if you were to buy a "televisione" instead of a "televisore", I'd think you're buying a TV network or something.
Just discovered your second channel. Really excited about it. Please keep up the good work, we love you
As a Spanish native speaker from Spain, I need to clraify the televisión example. In Spain we also have two words, sometimes they're used with both meanings but in reality they're slightly different. Let me explain. Televisión is feminine (La televisión) but it means mostly the "industry" of TV, one phrase we use a joke when in a TV programme is "mira mamá, salgo en la tele" (watch me mom, I'm on TV). But we also have "El televisor" which is masculine and it's not used frequently. Televisor means only the hardware, the machine, the physical screen. So when you're going to buy a new TV screen you say "Voy a comprarme un televisor nuevo" (I'm going to buy a new TV). In reality, we use the short term and say "Voy a comprarme una tele nueva", "tele" is the short term for televisor, but also we use it as short term for televisión like saying "Voy a ver la tele" (I'm going to watch TV). So in the end we have televisión y televisor, the first is the industry of television as a whole, the second one is the machine itself; and the first one is feminine and the second one masculine.
Perfect timing for this upload, as I'm currently learning (more) Italian by way of Spanish, a method called "triangulation", where you learn a third or fourth or even fifth language by using another one related to it.
¡Muy bien! Very interesting as usual Metatron. Another point where Italian is slightly more difficult than Spanish is the tonic accent in writing. Italian indicates the tonic accent on the last syllable, as in Perù, cf. Spanish Perú, but not in Bergamo (Bérgamo) or Cordova (Córdoba). Here in the province of Bergamo, there are places with names like Sorisole, Ambivere and Longuelo. How are they pronounced? Sorísole, Ambívere, Lónguelo.
I’m native italian and fluent in spanish. I don’t think italian is harder. Some things are easier, others are more complex, but all in all, I believe it to be more or less a tie
As a French speaker, I think that Italian words are easier and closer to recognize than Spanish words
Even these three languages are based on Latin, the spanish words require me to think to an usual word which has the same root latin word
Grazie perché mi aiuti a migliorare l'inglese e l'italiano contemporaneamente!😂 Dovresti fare una serie per italiani che faticano con l'inglese o vogliono semplicemente migliorare. Complimenti per il canale che ho appena scoperto 🎉
Greetings from Mexico. What do you think about Interlingua, the auxiliary language? Do you think it could help speakers of romance languages to develop more interintelligibility between our languages? Or, do you think learning latin would help in that goal? I've been listening to Interlingua with subtitles, and it feels similar to when I try to communicate with other speakers of romance languages, and the mental gymnastics I go through got me thinking about this. The subtitles help a lot, by the way.
I understand that the video is most likely intended for non-native/non-fluent speakers of either Italian or Spanish, but I was still hoping for a more formal exploration of grammar and phonology differences. That would definitely be a future video idea that I'd root for.
I'd like to share my thoughts about Italian as a native Spanish speaker. As it is widely known, it is so natural to pick up Italian, that that itself becomes the greatest difficulty; in other words: unlearning what is soo deeply rooted in your Spanish-speaking mind when it's different in Italian. That is, of course, a very broad and all-pervading feature, and something that can definitely be overcome with a conscious and focused effort. You just gotta take Italian seriously if you wanna master it.
On a more technical approach, I think that the miscellanous differences (vocabulary, gender, additional articles) are almost trivial and something you just really have to memorize. Regarding grammar, I was able to find a 1 to 1 correspondence between Spanish and Italian grammar almost every time. Even in the most fine-grained aspects, like the usage of subjuntivo/congiuntivo, I still found it comparable and natural-enough (although both languages are full of different exceptions). If I have to pick one feature that I think is objectively harder in Italian, it would be the usage of particles like "ne" and "ci". We have a similar usage with the parcile "se" in Spanish (for wich Italian has an equivalent), but the usage of the other particles never came to me as naturally, and was something that had to be learned mostly case by case.
Thanks for the great video and I'd love to keep having this type of language topics.
I'd also wager that the "avere/essere" distinction in the perfect tenses is also a significant difficulty compared to Spanish which only uses "haber" in these cases.
@@laurencsikistvan6630 Not a huge difficulty. Essere for verbs of motion and reflexive verbs, avere in all other cases.
@@Kinotaurus In theory, it's not so difficult, but in real time it'll slip up the learner.
agreed. I wonder how odd it sounds for Spanish speakers to say IL mio libro or la mia bicicletta when mio and Mia is more like mine and then with the IL and La at the beginning.
Without having even started the video i'll go out on a limb and say Italian merely because it's El/La, Los/Las for Spanish against Il/L'/La, I/Gli/Le for Italian, lets see how it stacks up
For me spanish would be easier because I could walk down the street and find at least 10 people whose first language is spanish that I could practice speaking with. It gets really fun when I go to a family reunion on my husband's side and there's at least 4 different forms of spanish spoken.
Damn dude that's rough. I'm sorry you have to deal with that.
There aren't four different forms of spanish. Spanish is only one language. When speaking it, people use different words that mean the same and also use different accents according to the region they live.
@ceciliarivera197 that does make it different. I consider English spoken in England, the US, Australia, and India different forms of English. It's all the same language but with different accents and words used that make it difficult sometimes to understand each other even when technically using the same language.
Let’s no confused Castilian Spanish vs. American spanish
@@MrSanchezgil "Let’s no confused British English vs. American English". To my understanding that doesn't make sense... it's the same language. Or maybe English and Americans don't understand each other? And Spanish and Latin American either?
Italian is harder, but with greater benefits in linguistic beauty and expressiveness; Spanish is easier, but with the very clear benefit of being way more widely spoken.
your explanation is very smart and objectives
Hello there Metatron I love your points and comparison.
Would it be possible to also compare Catalan and Occitan with Italian? Native spears say they have a strong kinship with Italian so I would love to see your thoughts on the subject
🤗 Awesome video! I am a teacher of English in Uruguay, but I also speak Portuguese and Italian. About the TV, at least in Uruguayan Spanish there's also "la televisión" (female, even newer generations "la tele" as in British English "telly"), and "el televisor" (older generations).
One thing easier about Italian is its clearer crisper pronunciation. Spanish on the other han can sound a bit slurred and as if the mouth was full of cotton balls, which requires more concentration when listening (back when I was learning it).
About registers, televisore is mainly used on advertising and shops.
Televisione also means the abstract concept of channels and show schedule, studios and people involved.
I'm a native Spanish (Argentina) and English (USA) speaker, and I've tried speaking Italian, it's a weird mental rewiring - to me, hearing Italian sounds like a strange, stammered version of Spanish. You have to move word placements, and that is something that is difficult. Now, that being said, if I moved to Italy, I would most likely be speaking Italian to a pretty high level in a year. It's all about immersion.
Mental re-rewiring indeed. I’m not native of either Spanish or Italian but one you’ve learned one and solidified it , you have to unlearn some and make it make sense in the other language.
About the use of the words “televisore” vs “televisione” at the beginning of the video I think there might be a difference in their meaning, at least originally. I believe “televisione” referred to the immaterial telecommunication medium while “televisore” was the actual television receiver or TV set. Maybe with time the word “televisione” extended its meaning to both concepts and is the most used today.
Also the second website you showed has a horrible spelling mistake (at least I was taught so in my school days) with the elision of the article “gli”. But I did see it around a few times in newspaper articles and such so I wonder if the rules have changed.
Love your content. Ciao
No. gl' non si può proprio vedere. Non è cambiata la regola. Può essere che venisse usato nel 1800, ma oggi nessun italiano oserebbe elidere l'articolo gli.
Hey Metatron, I have a question and it may be an interesting video to make.
Can you learn two languages simultaneously and achieve "good" progress with both? For example English and Italian or Italian and German, and maybe how that differs with two closer languages (Spanish and Italian) and two very different languages (maybe French and Bulgarian or even a western and a far eastern language). Is it better or worse to learn two close languages, or will your mind get confused because of relatively close rules and words? I would love to learn more about this.
At absolute beginner's level Italian is harder. The accent is probably harder too. When I tried to talk Italian I kept getting told I had a Spanish accent. I come from London!
You make a good point about vulgar Latin. Saying nobody spoke classical Latin because it's so complicated is like saying nobody speaks Russian because it's so complicated. Yes it is and they do.
Il televisare (m), for me, only refers to the physical devise, specifically. La televisione (f) can be both the devise and a broadcasting channel.
It might be interesting if you could do a lesson on the various dialects/languages of Italian and how the differences came to be.
Yes, it would be interesting from Metatron! I just want to point out that dialects and languages in Italy are NOT derivative of Italian rather they often are local oral (sometimes also written) forms of Latin distorted by local phonetics and habits.
Italian came later with the first literature authors in vulgar language who mainly picked up either Tuscan or Sicilian or other regional Latin- dialects and languages and put it in a n organised written form.
Standard Italian mostly but not exclusively comes from Tuscan.
@@negy2570 I would think that those who came before in their respective lands plus those who came after also had an influence. This is why the isolated islands, I think Sardinia is one if my memory serves correct, is closer to the classical Latin than say Sicily who had the Berbers, Normans, etc. afterwards. I would imagine those living in Gaul had Gallic influences and then Frankish and Norman etc. Its like starting with a cheesecake recipe and then mixing chocolate in one batch and strawberries in another. They're both the same yet different
Difficile da dire! Sono madrelingua spagnola (portoricana) e abitai in Italia per circa 8 anni. Mi affascina particolarmente la granularità di una lingua in termini di modulazione della voce, gesti, micro differenze linguistiche che possono esistere tra le lingue mutuamente intelligibili come le nostre. Per me, l'italiano è un pochino più difficile (naturalmente) per il "CI" e "NE" e perche' devo ricordarmi di modulare un po' la voce, aprire alcune vocali, soprattutto quando si aggiunge lo "schwa" alla fine delle parole che terminano con una consonante. (tipo: "bancomat-uh", "idem-uh", ecc). Nonostante questo, l'italiano mi ha fatto apprezzare la mia madrelingua. :)
Grazie per il contenuto!
Grazie mille per questo video e tutti tuoi video. Sono Italian Americano e mi piace tuo materiale.
in Spanish "el televisor" it is the device talking about of material object "la television" is when you are talking about related technology but people can exchange this last meaning for both subjects on common daily communication.
Colombian here. Traveled to Italy, intelligibility is big, speed is not as important as having a knowledge in synonyms, although you'd obviously prefer a person to not speak fast. Educational level truly does not matter, communication is easy, only need to find the correct synonym to understand any sentence. And even if a word has no equivalent, we both cultures speak with our hands xd vorrei ritornare a Italia 💙
I am an Italian that misses and loves Colombia and the paisa accent. Italy and Colombia forever
I would say it is much easier for Italians to understand Spanish than vice versa.
Qhubo pana. La verdad creo que los italianos están pero a otro nivel incluso comparandose a nosotros xD.
@@philswiftreligioussect9619 ¿Qué quieres decir con " están a otro nivel"?
@@troiscarottes Los italianos tienen su propio lenguaje de señas xD. Osea yo que soy rolo y todo y admito que los italianos usan las manos pa comunicarse mucho más q nosotros.
I love your content, and after watching this I thought I might be able to add some more to the conversation... you mentioned there are 2 words for television in Italian with both a feminine and a masculine version of the same word. In Spanish it is actually quite the same... Spanish will use El Televisor, and la Television - again very similar to how you talked about Italian...
What I think is interesting also is Spanish will also interchange using the abbreviated version TV, but I have heard about a 50% split on whether it should be masculine or feminine - and have heard it both ways from cubans, colombians, mexicans, et al... and that is some will say El TV, and others will say La TV - I have also heard it used with both La and El for "tele"
I just thought it might be worth sharing with you...
I also very much agree - I learned Spanish rather easily (probably because I live in areas where Mexican Spanish is very common) - but I did start to study Italian, and there are some very interesting difficulties... In some cases, I would almost say understanding plurals in German might even be easier than understanding Italian plurals!
Please keep up the excellent work - I love the content you produce - especially with regards to language
in Isvizerra.. i hear this quite a lot here in Puglia, especially with elderly people who are used to talk in their dialect on a daily basis.
Interesting, in Polish we also have two words associated with television that are almost identical to Italian: feminine "telewizja" and masculine "telewizor" (w is IPA /v/ and j is IPA /j/). But here they are not interchangeable, they're semantically distinct: "telewizja" is used to refer to the abstract concept of television and "telewizor" is used to refer to the device.
So for example our public TV is called "Telewizja Polska" - "The Polish Television", but you go out to buy a new "telewizor".
Similarly in French : la télévision vs le téléviseur.
Specifically, le téléviseur is the machine or box that you watch whereas la télévision includes the whole concept including programming. I imagine it's the same in Italian?
I've never understood this harder or easier thing. Learning is always relative. Some people have a bigger knack of picking up languages than others. Languages that are related might be easier to learn, such as Spanish, Portuguese and French. I don't think it can exist as absolutes.
French is more distant compared to Italian, my language, and Spanish.Once you 've learned both of them you can learn Portuguese which is very similar to Spanish.
I believe that it’s more or less for those watching that have a similar background. Say if I was to make a video about is Spanish or Italian was harder to learn- my target audience would be English speakers right? Right. But in this comparison it wouldn’t really matter as it’s comparing Spanish va Italian which are both Romance languages with or without taking into account one’s native language so it would pretty much be about the same
As a spanish speaker I think Italian is a bit harder for many reasons:
- Spanish has more regional variations.
For example: If somebody says "el sartén" it is not wrong even if I always say "la sartén", because in many regions this noun can be masculine.The same with many expresions, a Cuban would say: Cómo tú estás? I would say: Cómo estás?. Both are right.
In Italian you do not have that tolerance.
- The contractions in Italian.
The stressed syllable in Italian if it is not a word you know. Spanish is more straightforward. You never have these problems.
- The fact that if you read literature from the XIX century (no need to go back further) in Italian you find many words that are no longer used. E.g.: Manzoni uses the word "uscio" plenty of times. But nowadays, unless you are in Tuscany, most Italians do not use that word any more, they say "porta".
In Spanish you have to go further back in time to find so many archaisms in written language.
Fascinating video and explanation. Congratulations you have a new subscriber. I am Spanish speaking and I learned Italian. Italian took me a little while to learn, although similar in some cases to Spanish, Italian has some traps that there are not in Spanish. But when you learn Italian with a good teacher there is no problem. Italian is difficult for me to write because of the double letters in a lot of words. Greetings
For an English speaker Spanish is easiest, Italian is just a bit harder. When I was deployed to Italy, I already spoke Spanish reasonably well. After a week or two I was getting along OK in Italian.
In Spanish, many people also put articles in front of their first and last names, for example: "Mañana llega la Susana con su esposo", or "La Aguilera ya no canta como lo hacia antes", but I must admit that it is not seen as in a good tone. .
I had English, French and Spanish in school/ high school and started with Italian only recently. My pet peeve (compared with Spanish) are indeed the articles and the plural in Italian. As learning articles and singular/plural are usually at the very beginning of learning a new language, I can imagine that this makes Italian look harder to learn.
German is my first language and I find Spanish more phonetic, easier to understand to the extent that, when spoken at moderate speed in Castilian without much of an accent, I can understand every single word even if I have no clue what that word means.
That does not work that well in Italian, and does not work at all in French LOL
French pronunciation is complex and pretty nasal, which makes it a bit harder!
As a native French speaker, I found Italian more difficult than Spanish, which was not obvious because listening or reading Italian, you tend to understand and "recognize" whole words and phrases, so you naively believe it will be easier the other way around😇 . But when you want to really speak, then Italian syntax requires a lot of agility and some thinking, even after some time🤔. Spanish is more "regular". Both languages are wonderful anyway, each with its own genius, worth any effort and give you access to extraordinary cultures ❤
Thanks for the video !
Ah yes, Italian syntax, that thing that changes depending on really subtle differences in meaning
Italian has a way too free word order for a language with relatively little marking
I am trying to learn Spanish at the moment and having spent many summers in Italy in my teens and I had some problem with one two , "uno, dos" because I kept saying "uno due" and because I dont really spoke Italian and no Spanish it was very difficult to get rid of the "due"....
Spanish has two word for Television: La televisión, el televisor. As in Italian, the first one is widely used, the second one is rarely used, but nobody will care if you used either.
When I was a kid, my grandpa was teaching me Italian, and the worst problem I remember having was sorting out pronomi combinati, and a little less with trouble with pronomi doppi. Those didn't square nicely with my native Slavic language, and its dialect filled with Italian words.
BTW, have you forgotten the word "fewer" since you moved to US?
(min 7:00) In Spain we also use both terms: "el televisor" (masc.) is when we talk about the device (not much use today), "la televisión" (fem.) is when we are referring to the programs and all the things related to them (nowadays is also used to refer the device as well)...
I'm learning Italian now, I already speak Spanish and French, but this is slightly a new level to me, similar to how I learned German but now the grammar is a problem whereas in German my problem has always been its vocab, I've been learning French for about 1 year and it feels like I know more words however I'm still a bit more comfortable speaking German cause I've been learning it for quite a long time, my whole comparably conscious life 😂😂😂
It's a bit subjective. Depends on which one you started first, and a bunch of other factors.
@@HyperManSP who said it wasn't, it's my experience
@@EugeniusNaumenco I'm slightly confused at your reaction. Did you think I was belittling you in some way? What I said would seem to be in line with what you said...
As a native Italian, I'd argue our grammar is much harder than Spanish.
@@yrooxrksvi7142 yeah, that's what I'm talking bout
It's very interesting as a native speaker of Spanish (I also speak English and French fluently) I can understand 90% of Italian and Portuguese. French helps me in understand the words that are different in Italian that are different from Spanish (Comer -Manger -Mangiare). We too have different gendered variations on Television. We can say "la Televisión" to mean the actual object, but also the broader concept of "Television". We can also say "el Televisor" which sounds more antiquated but refers to the Object only. Colloquially "La tele" is used throughout the Spanish speaking world. There is also a phenomenon where we use articles before names "la Marcia, el Pablo, la Justina" which is common in my country to do, but considered poor grammar. As for speed of speaking, that is where I disagree with you - Spanish is know for having the worlds fastest speakers, to the degree that as a native speaker if I speak to certain speakers from other places I find it difficult to understand exactly what they are saying, largely because of speed. When we meet people outside of our own accents and dialects it is considered good form to speak slower than you would normally. Cheers! Great video
Great T-shirt! Up the Irons!
I used to think that il televisor refers to the device and la televisione to the concept of producing, broadcasting etc for the television. Glad to hear that I can use only one of the two words.
7:00 now that you mention it, it's exactly the same in spanish: la televisión, el televisor. But everybody says: la tele.
Colombian here (native Spanish speaker). we have the same El televisor/La televisión as Italian, it seems. In Spanish El televisor refers to the machine, whereas La televisión revers to what is being televised.
Hi, what Spanish would you think best to learn for getting around the world?
The “prothetic i” is a mostly obsolete phenomenon whereby an “i” is added to words beginning with “s”+consonant (or “gn”, in ancient Italian), when preceded by a word ending in a consonant. Examples include: in isposa, per ischerzo, in Isvizzera, etc.
Nowadays it survives only in some crystallized expressions such as “per iscritto”.
I have encountered this phenomenon several times in my readings, but I would hardly think it worth mentioning as a hindrance to learning Italian.
This is interesting. This would make it a phenomenon that all Romance languages went through like: escuela (spanish), ecole (french), escola (portuguese). Italian probbaly dropped it to feel/look closer to the original Latin language.
Televisore usually refers to the screen, the object, Television the medium (and sometimes the object as well)
It depends a lot on wich language you start from and to what degree you want to be fluent
En español también tenemos "el televisor" y "la televisión", que en algunos contextos puede significar lo mismo, pero el término "el televisor" no es tan usado
Que buen video! Saludos!!!
It will be cool if you do a video on the different s's.
13:30
not to mention, depending on the region, we also use the article with the names of acquaintances. I don't know how it works in other regions, but in Veneto we'd always use it when referring to female friends and classmates: la Lucrezia, l'Anna, la Maria
En algunos dialectos latinoamericanos también dicen: la María, el Jorge. Pero no tanto en variantes formales (excepto mujeres famosas y actrices): la Garbo, la Félix.
Nice shirt.
I'm from Veneto, and there (Maybe in other parts of the region is different) we colloquially put the article before feminine Personal names but not masculine. We say :"Ho appena chiamato la Maria"(I've just called Maria), but :"Ho visto Marco in stazione"(I saw Marco at the station), and so we do with teachers at school
The televisore/televisione distinction is the same in Spanish and English: televisor/ televisión and tv set/television. How often the word is used is another issue.
In Spanish the television is also male and female, "la television" and "el televisor"
Yes, but there's a rule about when to use which. The masculine version refers to the physical/actually TV set/box itself. The feminine version refers more to what you watch on it. So "Miro la televisión" but "Llevo el televisor". Hope this helps.
As a side note, I don't know if a similar things occurs in Italian, or if they're completely interchangeable.
oh and also the computer, "la computadora", "el computador"
@@koontroll3364 Yep, pretty much! I just don't know if that same rule applies in Italian.
@@Deibi078 I didn't know that one, actually! I just knew that Spaniards have a completely different word for computer.
Hi there, nice videos, just discovered them. About articles in front of names, one clarification: by defaults women get an article in front of their name or surname in most regions (la Carla, la Martina, la Rossi), while men get it only in very few regions (il Piero, il Francesco, il Rossi). This is considered rude in high standard Italian, however you can still hear journalists saying "la Meloni, la Schlein" while they stick to simply write/say "Salvini, Conte". For famous people, IMHO there is no rule, but the tendency is not to give an article with a name if the name is enough to recognize the person (Dante, Raffaello, Michelangelo, Saffo, Artemisia) but with a surname or nickname (il Verga, il Tintoretto, etc).
En español también se dice el televisor o la televisión. Muchas veces palabras que parecen distintas en uno y otro idioma, tienen algún "pariente común" que facilita la comprensión: mi hermano, il mio fratello.... un español lo entiende porque fraternidad es el vínculo entre hermanos. Pasa también con trabajo y lavoro... en español labor es trabajo y el derecho laboral el que rige las relaciones laborales. Supongo que debe pasar algo similar con el italiano.
Creo que ambas son iguales en facilidad o dificultad, lo verdaderamente difícil es hablar ambas sin mezclarlas (itañolo o espaliano). Estudié latín durante muchos años (lo leo con facilidad) y me ha servido para relacionar no sólo las lenguas latinas si no también mucho vocabulario en las lenguas anglosajonas. Gracias por tu aportación, es la primera vez que veo un video tuyo.
So basically what you are saying 12:00 is that we don't really need to worry about how to pronounce the z because either form would be recognized by an Italian because different accents pronounce it differently. Yes?
I totally agree with you about TV, as a concept and an apparatus! In Spanish we also refer to la televisión or la tele as a concept, saying things like "voy a ver la tele" and we use el televisor to refer just to the actual device, and it's much less common. I would use it to ask "¿y por qué no funciona este televisor que recién compramos?" I feel like we would usually just use feminine for every use though. Televisor isn't common, and it's somewhat too specific and old-ish. I would compare the feeling I get from hearing "televisor" to the one I get when someone says "TV set" in English. It's specifically the device, and saying it makes someone sound a bit old fashioned. "Why doesn't this TV set work? We just bought it!" All of this is from the perspective of an General American English and North American Spanish speaker. Is it similar in Italian?
Wow! This is so interesting.
Hello Metatron, would you like to make a video about the Romanian language? If you can I have ideas like: If Romanian is counted as a Romance language? Compare Romanian with other Romance language like Italian. Is Romanian easy to learn? Or why Romanian it's different than the other Romance languages? Thank you for reading and huge respect from Romania🇷🇴
As an American, living in the USA, who is learning both, Italian is subjectively harder. I get to use what I learned in Spanish practically every day, just by going about my daily activities. If I want to practice Italian, I have to visit Italy or Switzerland, or seek out speakers to converse with.
The thing about speaking slowly applies better to portuguese, sense the phonetic is so different from Spanish or Italian.
Here is a perspective from a non native speaker who learnt both Italian and Spanish as an adult: As I lived in Italy many years ago, had an Italian girlfriend at that time, made a substantial effort to learn Italian and became rather good at it, at least according to Italian colleagues and friends, I find the content of this video interesting, but the title a bit confusing. This was more about: "Why Italian is a complex language" (I agree) rather than its differences with Spanish. A couple of years later I spent a whole year in Madrid, had to pick up Castellano, then left Spain for Panama where I spent five years and found that their version of Spanish is very different from the one in Spain. Now, based on my humble experience one aspect that might be slightly harder in Spanish compared to Italian is the verbs, as they have conjunctions for the informal "tu" in both singular and plural (os) and also for the formal "usted"(lei) in both singular and plural (ustedes) on top of ellos(loro), nosotros(noi) and vosotros(voi). Yes I know that not all forms are used on a daily basis but it is nevertheless still used occasionally, and as I discovered when I moved to Panama, it also varies depending on in which Spanish speaking country you are.
Does Italian differentiate between the television (reciever + display) and televison (the technology)?
Yes, "il televisore" the first, "la televisione" the second.
Is the subjunctive employed in italian as much as spanish?
It's impossible to determine which language is more complicated, unless you're native to both. I've heard in different countries people and even language teachers saying that their language is more complicated than others, that they have a greater variety of synonyms and ways to express ideas, etc.
I'm native speaker of Spanish and German. Of course, in both countries people believe their language is more complicated than the other. Fact is, they don't know the other language they are speaking about or maybe they just have a basic knowledge and judge based on it.
What I can say is: both are complicated if you come from a completely different language tree.
More or less you already explained it in this video: for German speakers it's relatively easy to learn English, but it would be a real challenge for an Italian to learn Russian.
Btw, thanks for your nice video 👍🏻
Being French, Italian is much easier, they're almost two similar languages w Spanish is slightly different and harder
Didn't you state in your "Swiss Italian" video that in northern Italy it's custom to use an article with names?
Please Metatron, would you mind telling us what is the music on the background? -Man, don't take this like I don't listen to you, haha!
By the way, I never knew this was a general concern. I am Spanish -from Spain- and for a few years I was working in a factory owned by Italians, so a number of co-workers were Italian, too. We managed to understand each other pretty well (especially at night, at the disco: "c'è un sacco di figa qui"). Anyway, to further complicate the matters: that happened in Portugal, where, as you perfectly know, they speak Portuguese. They -the Portuguese- say: "Espanhol é Portugués mal falado" and I think they are right. Do you have an opinion on that? God bless.
In-i-Spagna e in-i-Svizzera le ho sentite in qualche vecchio doppiaggio di film anteguerra. L’aria di Leporello nel Don Giovanni riporta Ispagna al posto di Spagna, non so se per facilitare il cantante o se perchè a fine Settecento si dicesse così.
Super video!
I would say that what makes Italian harder is mostly how there are many more irregular verbs or verbs that have some irregular forms (especially in the supine). All the other differences are not significantly harder. For example, the plural and articles in Italian are more difficult, but Spanish differentiates between ser/estar, and so on. Italian also has both the verb essere and avere for the past participle (sono andato, ho mangiato), while Spanish only uses haber (he ido, he comido).
Honestly, I'm a bit baffled that you chose to make this video, given that you don't speak Spanish, but okay. By being very superficial, you didn't say anything wrong, to be fair.
With Welsh and Irish/Scots-Gaelic though I find that reading Cornish or Breton or Manx somewhat alleviates the difficulty because they have similar vocabularies and grammatical structure but use letter values much closer to English in their written form.
I can understand the "per isbaglio" because that's what I heard when you said it. Maybe it's the way Italians separate words, kind of like an intrusive R in British English.
As a native speaker of Italian, do you (Metatron-or for that matter any other Italians who might like to answer!) usually find Occitan easier to understand than Spanish, as the whole dialect-continuum thing would seem to suggest? (Though ofc any Occitan- or Spanish-learning you’ve done could skew the results, and maybe you haven’t encountered many situations where you needed to figure out what someone was saying in Occitan.)
"In Isvizzera, per isbaglio" sono soluzioni prostetiche che rispondono a regole fonetiche ottocentesche non più usate. Se cerchi nei libri dell'Ottocento, trovi queste due soluzioni spesso.
Sopravvive nell'italiano contemporaneo solo più una formula cristallizzata, "per iscritto".
Finalmente la spiegazione corretta.
Scusa ma ti è sfuggita una precisazione: il televisore è l'apparecchio, il mezzo," l'hard disk" per vedere la televisione, l'emissione di un programma o di tutti i programmi. Oggi si usa sempre "televisione in ogni situazione, ma non sarebbe corretto. Se getto il televisore dalla finestra, posso ancora vedere .a televisione per esempio in rete....Trovo il tuo lavoro comunque lodevole. Grazie. Marino
In Spanish, we also have 'la televisión' or 'la tele' (feminine) and 'el televisor' (masculine). We can use both as synonyms to refer to the television set. But when referring to the transmission, we only use 'la televisión'.
I'm an native English speaker from the US, and for me Italian has been harder to learn. I took 4 semesters of it in College and really struggle with it. Meanwhile, I've been able to become fluent in Spanish on my own. I should note I also lived in Spain for 3 months where I was fully immersed, so that certainly helped.
That's just my personal experience, and I haven't given up on Italian yet. Hopefully I'll be able to spend a few months in Italy some day and come back to the US fluent.
Italian is a bit harder than Spanish as there is “extra” stuff not present in Spanish.
'Il televisore' refers to the receiving device; 'la televisione' is the telecommunication system suitable for remote transmission of impermanent images. The two terms pertain to different concepts and are not, or should not be, interchangeable.
Agreed. I always understood "la televisione" to refer to the medium, and "il televisore" the appliance. In everyday conversation, it often happens that the former is used to refer to both.
Actually for us Spanish speakers, the slower the Italian speaker speaks Italian the better we understand. Podcast Italiano and Irene La Preziosa enunciate a very neutral/clear Italian compared to others I've listened to. I'm not sure if it's regional (or they are mixing a variant of Italian) or something.
Native speakers who teach their language to foreigners tend to be very mindful of how they speak and therefore control the speed, pronunciation (are very clear) and type of vocabulary they use in order to be understood by non native speakers. When speaking naturally, however, Italians (as people who speak any other language) tend to speak at a normal speed (some people naturally speak faster than others) which may still be too fast for a non native speaker, use a mix of standard language, regional language and dialect. People will change register depending on their audience. As Metatron said: in more formal situations standard language will tend to be used while in less formal situations people tend to mix standard language (with regional variances) and local dialect. The educational level of a person matters too. The more educated a person is the more mindful they tend to be when speaking with a non native speaker and are less likely to use regional Italian. Also older generations tend to speak more dialect than standard Italian (unless they are particularly educated).
Podcast Italiano parla ad un ritmo talmente lento da essere innaturale. Dovessi venire in Italia scoprirai una realtà diametralmente opposta.
About the “televisione/televisore” case, in Spanish we also have two words. Exactly like in Italian, feminine “televisión” is the most common one, but my grandmother for instance sometimes uses masculine “televisor”.
In Spanish we also have el televisor but it describes the actual television , la television is more for the shows that are on . But we often shorten it and say la tele” estoy viendo la tele” maybe it depends on the country though too , there’s almost 500 million native Spanish speakers , there is some variety
I think I use a significantly more Italian loanwords in my daily English than I do Spanish ones. Mainly the ones that have to do with musical terms and the different types of coffee, but they are in my vocabulary a bit more than Spanish loanwords for sure.
The only Spanish loanwords I could see coming into daily use here would be the names for Mexican food, so mainly Mexican Spanish -- but even some of those words were in turn brought into Spanish from Nahuatl, so can we ultimately call them Spanish?
The adding i- before word-initial [sC] is just old-timey and somewhat regional. It sound fairly late 1800s.
There is also in Spanish "El Televisor" which is also mostly an old word and mostly refers only to the screen itself and not the TV as a communication system, so yeah, in that aspect Italian and Spanish are mostly the same.
"Il televisore" is the object, the tv set/screen.
"La televisione" is both the object (and yes, it's the preferred alternative) and the industry behind it, or at least a specific network. It's tv as a communication medium, a place of employment, a cultural phenomenon. Especially before the internet, one would say "andrò in televisione" to mean "I'll be a (however small) tv celebrity".
It's like "movie theater" vs "cinema".