Report Blog Entry
hey once again,
i am thinking of learning a language. even though i like learning the basics of a lot of languages, i am thinking about whether to "intensively" learn french or italian. i already know spanish fluently and for academic reasons i am thinking of branching out my possibilities for research.
first is french, that gives me access to many documents in north africa, thats part of my interest. although, you would ask, rightly so, why not arabic? the dialects are varied and if i learned darija (moroccan), i wouldnt be understood by someone from egypt and if i learned standard arabic, i wouldnt understand probably nobody other than current modern texts, so useless. according to my moroccan friends, french is spoken in universities and my friend who is working on a project in saudi arabia has many of the documents in french or english, if not arabic. also, i did do french for like 4 years in school so basic conversation i can manage even if its a bit (very) rusty.
i dont plan on going to france anytime soon so it would be learning french for everywhere but france. kinda feels like subscribing to the idea of colonialism? (feels very wrong but also i know spanish and english for basically that reason)
secondly, there is italian, another language i dont find rather appealing personally but italy is mentioned infinitely in heritage subjects, and my tutor is italian so it doesnt help (recommends books in italian). so if i wanted to work with for example, mediterranean heritage, italian would be helpful cause it seems like most archeological seminars/conferences i get are partially in italian (the pptx and heavy accent).
personally, i would prefer to learn another language but i also want to add an actual language to my CV. i always was happy to be native english speaker, to be able to research easily in english and spanish while my classmates were a bit more limited there.
Comments
Displaying 1 of 1 comments ( View all | Add Comment )
Miixue
I am french and learning italian. Since you speak spanish already, i would recomend learning intensely Italian, as it will feel less hard. French can be brutal. By speaking/learning both spanish and italian, learning french will come easier than if you went full throttle french. I believe that you could become fluent in italian in much less time than french. However, it seems french is the language you would find more use in, so it's up to you.
Whichever you choose, i wish you good luck in your studies !