If you speak English, learning many other languages may be easier than you think.

[golyplot]

I've heard of aquamarine, but I've never heard of just "aqua" used to refer to the color. To me, it's mostly just a part of compounds that means water. Aquaduct, aquatic, aquarium, aquifer, ...

There's even a wikipedia page for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(color).

The names of colors was important in my previous career, which was fashion-related; but, e.g. amongst software engineers, there's going to be blank looks if you talk about something colored taupe, azure, coral, maroon, cobalt, mint, oyster, chestnut, teal, etc.

Yeah, you should talk about colors like #FF0000 like a normal person.

[Lisa]

I recall when I started with Spanish and German (many years ago), German seemed easier since they don't speak as fast; you can actually sometimes catch a word or two.

That may be an illusion.

In English and German, the language is timed by stressed syllables only; for example, the beats of this sentence are in bold, whereas in Spanish, the rhythm follows every syllable. The English-speaking brain picks up on the beat being faster and defines the language as being faster, even if it actually isn't.

Hmm. I always put it down to more difficult consonant combinations in German that required a little more time for the mouth to move around to make the sounds. Perhaps what I mean is just that it was easier to distinguish/identify words in speech, and stress is something that would help with that. Or, to be honest... I did hear a certain amount of spoken German as a small child, and no spoken Spanish. While I got no language skills from it, maybe I have slightly more neurons for German sounds than Spanish sounds...