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Hi there! My name is Valeria I am Italian and I love languages, like everyone here I suppose! I studied English and German, but they are a bit rusty now, so any help for keep them "fit" is welcome, I'm also planning to learn portuguese and japanese ( perfect match, don' t you think?)...Hope my brain will bear all of them Oh... I am a teacher, I teach Italian online, if any of you is interested in studying Italian, I' m here! Ciao, a presto!

@poftim Not precisely like in Romanian, but there are 7 cases in Polish. Muj kot = my cat. Daj mi kota = give me a cat. Jestem kotem = I'm a cat. 5 koty stały = 5 cats stood. 5 kotów stało = 5 cats stood. And so on.

You're most welcome, Cyrup.....I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say we were all more than happy to chip in I do hope it goes some way to helping you with your decision. Something tells me whatever you do, you'll be just fine. I totally agree with carrying on with French for a while, seeing as you've already started with that. But in all honesty, you should be fine because I've heard French and Spanish have some similarities. I can't say to what degree that's true because I've never tried to learn Spanish. I have to say someone told me Italian and French were similar, but I still not that convinced. I wish you the very best of luck, whichever way you take it, I'm sure you'll soar

I would call it "hard but simple" hahaha. I would have agreed with you on the script part a few years back, but now I think it's actually not that difficult. It's more scary than anything. But as long as you start that's basically half work done. The other one is stick with it and actually practice on daily basis. The hardest thing for ME would be listening. It really takes the longest time to get used to. 3 reasons I would mention here, obviously the tones (unless you already know a tone-based language this will prove rather tricky to get used to), the fact that everything sounds the same! hahaha (different words have different pronunciation of course, but they are still very close to each other with minimal difference, example: q, j; ch, zh; n, ng; shi, she....it really takes some getting used to being able to really hear the difference), finally there are words with the same pronunciation and the same spelling (usually different character though, but not always) but they mean different things! So 1. tone changes the meaning, 2. words sound very much alike and again the meaning is different, 3. same pronunciation (tones and everything) yet different meaning again. Now of course, literally billions of people speak Chinese, so it's not impossible to learn it, it's just a very slow process with getting used to the above. Especially if you don't live in Chinese speaking country. Compare with that, I find the writing to be not so bad yeah perhaps you're right there. It would be easier if you didn't have to remember 3 characters and the tones for these 3 "Open car" means to drive. So I agree with you in a sense that the logic is easy or rather simple. But wouldn't go so far as to say easy to remember. Perhaps the English translations are easier to remember since they are so interesting Just for the record I think "王国" means "kingdom", but "美国" should mean "beautiful country" if I'm not mistaken. I think the reason for this (and this is merely an educated guess) is that when America was discovered it was nice and beautiful and unspoiled. So calling it "beautiful country" was not so far fetched I think. What it is now is a topic for another time.