Which language should I learn?

[tarvos]

You should learn Kalaallisut to troll everyone here and do something interesting with your life.

[Cainntear]

I have always wanted to learn Spanish or Italian, but I'm not sure which one to learn first.

If it's a matter of which one to learn first rather than which one to learn, I'd say Spanish first, because I think it's a reasonable bit easier.

Italian has long consonants (technically "geminated"), and if you've never come across this in another language, it does make pronunciation harder to begin with.

These geminated consonants are marked by double letters, but then ZZ and SS aren't geminated, but denote a different sound from Z and S (Z = "dz", ZZ= "ts", S="z", SS="ss", essentially) and I kept getting confused and trying to geminate instead of changing the sound (but that's probably because my first teacher was absolutely rubbish and couldn't even really speak Italian).

There's nothing like these geminated sounds in Spanish.

Also, in Spanish, the stress pattern of a word is always clear from the written form -- if it's not in the expected place, it's marked with an accent. In Italian, the stress is only marked if it's on a vowel at the end of the word, so you can't simply read it and know how it's pronounced. However, if a word exists in both Spanish and Italian, the stress is almost always the same in both, meaning if you learn Spanish first, you don't have to worry so much.

[Dragon27]

To add to the above, I didn't learn much about Italian, but from what I know, its consonant system isn't much different from the Spanish one: Italian has its quirky geminates (as was already mentioned), Spanish has two ways of pronouncing /b/, /d/, /g/ phonemes. Spanish also has additional phonemes like /θ/ and /x/. But the first one is also familiar to English speakers, and if you go for the Latin American Pronunciation, you can just ignore it and use regular /s/. Besides, you can ignore the /ʎ/ phoneme in Spanish (as not many people use it now - even in Spain), but can't do that in Italian.

The vowel system, on the other hand, is exceptionally simple in Spanish - only five vowel phonemes (/i/, /u/, /e/, /o/, /a/ - which aren't much different from the Bulgarian ones). Whereas Italian has kept some of the original Latin vowel system by differentiating between /e/ and /ɛ/, and /o/ and /ɔ/, therefore making it 7 vowel phonemes. In fact, most of the "big" Romance languages have retained this distinction (Portuguese, French, Italian, Catalan, even Romansh). Also there are some that haven't (Asturian, Sardinian, Aragonese, Romanian (which has been influenced by Slavic languages), etc.). As a result, you have to look the words up in the dictionary and memorize the necessary phonemes (although that isn't bad - consulting the dictionary is always beneficial).

Given all that, I'm not sure what the author of the thread meant by

The Italian's pronunciation sounds me easier

[garyb]

In my opinion Spanish is the most approachable of the Romance languages: most widely spoken, best resources, most helpful native speakers, simplest pronunciation. Pronunciation aside I don't think it's technically any less difficult than the others, and its verb system is more complicated than that of Italian or French, but the positive factors can make Spanish more enjoyable and motivating. I'd only go for Italian (or French) first if you're particularly interested in the country and culture, but if you were then you probably wouldn't be asking the question.

I'd definitely skip Latin unless again you have a very keen interest in it, in which case any help it gives with the Romance languages is just a bonus, but otherwise it seems far more sensible to get straight into a modern and simpler language that you'll actually use and will be a better base for related ones in the future.

[renaissancemedici]

Speaking of radical ideas, Turkish, Serbian, Greek, Romanian are all in your backyard.

The Balkans...

Sometimes you just want to do something that has no connection to your backyard.

As far as job usefulness is concerned: focus on perfecting your English and German is my opinion, and then learn Russian on the side (cause you never know, right?). Everything else will probably be for travel and fun.

Now if it's fun you want, just pick your most loved language.

[Theodisce]

That's the thing with Latin. Most of its complexity is in the cases system. But that hasn't survived in Italian, Spanish, French or Portuguese. It is present in German and in Slavic languages (didn't know about Romanian!), but then they are not romance languages, so you can't carry over to them the vocabulary (apart from, again, Romanian).

It really depends if you just want to dabble in it for the cultural aspect, but in practical terms I think there isn't much usefulness in my opinion.

I've always seen the case systems of Latin and Ancient Greek as pretty transparent. You don't need to know all the case endings to deduce the meaning of a word from its context. In my opinion the most important difference between Latin (and Ancient Greek) and their modern descendants is the syntax, the sentence structure. Modern Greek, while preserving the case system, is syntactically much more similar to Romance languages than to Ancient Greek.

[reineke]