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🇪🇸 → 🇮🇹

How easy is Italian for Spanish speakers?

Going from Spanish to Italian (Italiano) has a composite linguistic distance of 14% (curated lexical data). Below is the dimension-by-dimension breakdown.

14% distance FSI Cat I (Easiest) — 600–750 hours
Lexical similarity
82%

Shared vocabulary, cognates, and loanwords.

Grammatical distance
100%

Morphology, syntax, word order, cases.

Phonological similarity
20%

Shared sounds and phoneme inventory.

Writing-system match
100%

Latin → Latin

Genealogical kinship
100%

Indo-European ↔ Indo-European

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Sample sentences side-by-side

How everyday sentences look in both languages:

🇪🇸 Spanish
El arte y la cultura son fundamentales para la sociedad moderna.
🇮🇹 Italian
L'arte e la cultura sono fondamentali per la società moderna.
🇪🇸 Spanish
La universidad tiene una biblioteca con miles de libros importantes.
🇮🇹 Italian
L'università ha una biblioteca con migliaia di libri importanti.

Curated cognates between Spanish and Italian

Word pairs that share a common etymological root — instantly recognisable across both languages:

Other easy languages for Spanish speakers

The 5 languages with the lowest linguistic distance from Spanish:

Think you can tell them apart?

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