Spanish or Italian: which to learn first

There is no ranking at the end of this page. We opened our own beginner packs and counted, and the result behaves like a set of conditions rather than a verdict. Here is the measurable part. At A1 our Spanish and Italian lists carry the same 617 English headwords, and for 178 of them the Spanish word and the Italian word sit within a small spelling distance of each other. That figure is 195 of 625 at A2. Swap Italian for Portuguese and the same measure returns 303 and 309. Italian is the middle case: far closer to Spanish than French is, nowhere near as close as Portuguese. Which one you start with turns on what you want the language for, and on several things our numbers have no way of seeing.

What our own lists count

Two languages can be compared on many things. This page compares one: given the same English headword at the same CEFR level, how close are the two words we teach for it. We lower-case both, strip the accents and the punctuation, take the edit distance between what is left, then divide by the length of the longer form. Anything at or below 0.25 counts as close. Spanish, Italian and Portuguese word overlap is the method page, with the full four-language matrix and our reason for never printing a lexical similarity percentage borrowed from the literature.

Four rows bear on this decision.

Along the Spanish and Italian row you get a pair that agrees on roughly three beginner words in ten and spells one in ten identically. The Portuguese row underneath agrees on half. French sits at the bottom for scale, and the gap between 79 and 303 is the whole reason this question has a real answer for one pairing and a soft one for the other.

Mean distance ranks them the same way. Across all 617 A1 headwords, Spanish to Italian averages 0.489, Spanish to Portuguese 0.352 and Italian to Portuguese 0.523, where 0.0 is an exact match and 1.0 means the two forms put no letter in the same place.

The things this measure cannot see

Edit distance reads letters and nothing else. Sound sits outside it, so the measure has no opinion on whether an Italian word you recognise on a menu will reach you when a waiter says it out loud. Grammar sits outside it too: the Italian passato prossimo and the Spanish pretérito never enter the arithmetic. Meaning is the expensive omission. Two words spelled the same score 0.0 whether they mean the same thing or the opposite of it.

This is also not a similarity figure for Spanish and Italian as languages. It measures our beginner lists, 617 headwords at A1 and 625 at A2, drawn from the frequency core of the New General Service List that Browne, Culligan and Phillips publish under CC BY-SA 4.0. A different word list would return different counts and we cannot say which way. The threshold is a decision as well. At 0.25 roughly one character in four may differ, which lets Spanish comprar through against Italian comprare at 0.125 and shuts out pairs a reader would spot instantly.

Difficulty is a separate question and we have no data on it whatsoever. Nothing in our packs records how long anyone took, how much stuck, or which language felt heavier in week three. When a page ranks two languages by difficulty on the back of a spelling comparison, it has gone further than the evidence goes, and that warning applies to this page as much as to anyone else's.

The case for Spanish first

If a third Romance language is coming, Spanish is the better hub, and our own numbers are the reason. From Spanish, Portuguese arrives with 303 of 617 A1 words already within a small spelling step and 179 of them spelled the same once accents come off. Italian arrives with 178. French arrives with 79. Starting in Spanish puts the shortest available second hop on the board and leaves the other two roughly where they were.

That suits a reader with no fixed destination, a reader heading anywhere in the Americas, and anyone who expects a third Romance language later and would rather the second one came cheap.

The cost is regional and it starts on day one. Our Spanish phrase collection is European Spanish with Latin American variants marked, and 24 of its 116 notes exist because a word changes across the Atlantic. Coger is unremarkable in Madrid and obscene in Mexico City. Straight ahead in Spain is todo recto, while Latin America says derecho, which a Spaniard can hear as the right-hand side. You pick a variety in your first week whether you meant to or not, and Spanish makes you pick more often than Italian does. Spanish mistakes English speakers make collects the ones with a price attached.

The case for Italian first

Nothing in these lists closes Spanish off if Italian goes first. The 178 close A1 words run in both directions, and the count rises at A2 rather than falling, to 195 of 625. Italian is the second-closest of the three to Spanish and the second-closest to Portuguese as well, which makes it an unremarkable place to stand and a perfectly safe one.

It suits a reader with a specific reason: a place they keep going back to, family, a field whose vocabulary already arrived in Italian. A reason that names a country outranks every figure here, because the figures move a few dozen words and the reason decides whether you are still at this in March.

There is one thing Italian gives a Spanish speaker that Portuguese does not. Of the 178 A1 words close in Spanish and Italian, 131 are also close in Spanish and Portuguese, which leaves 47 where Italian is the near neighbour and Portuguese went elsewhere.

Those 47 cluster in kitchen and house vocabulary, the part of the list you spend on the first afternoon. Against them run 172 words where Portuguese is close to Spanish and Italian is not, so we would be overstating the case to call this an argument for Italian. Call it the thing you would give up.

The cost is formality, and Italian asks earlier than Spanish does. Lei is the default with a stranger, an official and everyone at work on the first morning, and moving to tu has its own sentence that somebody has to say. Ciao is informal only, and said first to a pharmacist it breaks nothing visible, which is how the habit survives a year. Our Italian collection carries 148 notes across its 500 rows, more than the Spanish 116, and Italian mistakes English speakers make works through them.

What carries over, and what bites

Recognition is what carries. Beyond the 178 that clear the threshold sits a band that misses it and is still obvious on sight: interesante against interessante at 0.083, bicicleta against bicicletta, familia against famiglia, cuaderno against quaderno. Verbs are the dependable part, because the two infinitive endings differ by one letter over and over: cambiar and cambiare, costar and costare.

What bites is the set our measure scores as a perfect match. Pooling A1 and A2, our Spanish and Italian lists teach five spellings for different English headwords.

Every row there scores 0.0, the same score as verde against verde. That is the flaw in this arithmetic stated as plainly as we can state it, and it is why the false-friend count sits on this page instead of somewhere quieter.

The traps that cost the most belong to one language at a time. In Spanish the carta is the menu and el menú is the fixed-price set lunch, so the obvious translation orders something else. In Italian un caffè is an espresso and anything larger has to be named, while ricetta covers recipe and prescription both, which turns a question at a pharmacy counter into a question about paperwork. Neither trap has anything to do with the other language. Both arrive because the word looks like English.

If you already speak one of them

Coming from Spanish, Italian hands you 178 A1 headwords and 195 A2 headwords at recognition distance, about a third of each list. Coming from Italian, Spanish hands the same counts back, because the measure is symmetric. What is asymmetric is what sits behind each one, which is why the Portuguese column keeps mattering to a decision that looks like it is only about two languages.

The useful move is to skip the part you already have. Split our A1 list by its twelve themes and the Spanish to Italian overlap runs from 10 of 24 in Weather & Animals down to 8 of 51 in Greetings & Essentials. Hello, please, sorry and excuse me are where these two went their own way. The rain and the dog are where they did not.

Studying both at once is the question we would answer differently from most pages, and our answer is that we would not do it. The five shared spellings above are the visible part of the problem. The invisible part is that near-identical verb endings interfere in production long before they interfere in recognition, and nothing in our packs measures production. That is a limit on what we know rather than a finding, and we would rather say so than dress a hunch up as data.

Starting either one

Whichever way you go, the first few hundred words are the same job: pick one list and meet it often enough that the words stop being new.

The phrase collections are the fastest entry: The 500 Spanish phrases you actually need and The 500 Italian phrases you actually need, both grouped by the situations of a day rather than by grammar. For the graded corpus, our Spanish and Italian packs run A1 to C2 inside the 33,233-entry set, and the level and theme counts sit on Corpus statistics.

In the app, once the charger automation is set up, a word plays when the phone goes on charge, weighted towards whatever you have gone longest without hearing. Plug in. Hear a word. Whether it is Spanish or Italian coming out of the speaker matters less than whether the list is still in front of you on Thursday.

Common questions

Should I learn Spanish or Italian first?

Our lists do not make that call. They do show that Spanish is the cheaper starting point if a third Romance language is coming: 303 of 617 A1 headwords are close between Spanish and Portuguese, against 178 between Spanish and Italian. If your reason for learning names a country, that reason outranks the numbers, which move a few dozen words either way.

Is Italian easier than Spanish for an English speaker?

We have no data on difficulty and we do not publish a claim about it. Our packs can show spelling overlap between two languages, and spelling overlap says nothing about how long either takes to learn. The Italian phrase collection carries 148 notes across 500 rows and the Spanish one carries 116, which reflects where we judged a warning was needed rather than which language is harder.

Does knowing Spanish help with Italian?

On the page, for roughly three beginner words in ten. 178 of the 617 headwords our two A1 lists share have Spanish and Italian words within a small spelling distance, rising to 195 of 625 at A2, and 62 are the identical string at A1. Five spellings across those two levels carry different meanings in the two languages, including largo, which is long in Spanish and wide in Italian.

Can I learn Spanish and Italian at the same time?

Our numbers cannot answer that, and we would start one before the other. The five shared spellings we found at A1 and A2 are the part you can see. Interference between near-identical verb endings is the part you cannot, and nothing in our packs measures it.