Romance language (French, Italian, Portuguese, Latin or Romanian) are all quite close to each other, and if you speak one, learning Italian will be much, much easier. The closest is French.

Differences between Romance languages and Italian occur mainly with a few hundred totally different frequent words, false friends and pronunciation. It is important to study carefully these three areas before you go to Italy. This is an easy task and the most cost-effective time you can invest in studying a language. So do it seriously.

False friends are always a source of amusement, but need to be studied with care. For instance:

Perhaps Italians have a slight tendency to exagerate that became ingrained in the language?

Table of languages significantly similar to Italian

	Similarity			Statistics
	Vocabulary	Grammar		Speakers	Countries	GDP
Italian	100%	–		58 M	2	$1,490 bn
French	85%			213 M	17	$2,223 bn
Spanish	80%			376 M	25	$3,198 bn
Portuguese	80%			203 M	6	$666 bn
Romanian	65%			28 M	3	$60 bn
Latin	60%			–	1	–
Russian	10%			167 M	8	$548 bn
Total				1,045 M	62	$8185 bn

EXPLANATION

Similarity
VOCABULARY: Percentage of vocabulary that isvery similar in both languages.
GRAMMATICAL: Cactuses () indicate the relative difficulty of learning this language if you already speak Italian. The fewer cactuses/cacti, the easier.

Speakers
NUMBER: total number of native speakers of each language.
SHARE: number of speakers times % similar vocabulary (see above). This gives you an indication of the number of people you can reach indirectly by learning Italian.

Countries
NUMBER: Total number of countries where the language is an official language or widely spoken.
SHARE: The number of countries times % similar vocabulary (see above). This gives you an indication of the number of countries you can reach indirectly by learning Italian.

GDP
NUMBER: Combined total nominal GDP in US dollars for each language.
SHARE: Combined GDP times % similar vocabulary (see above). This gives you an indication of the economic importance of the language group you enter by learning Italian.

The purpose of this table is to list the most important languages similar to Italian and see how closely related they are. It helps you select the language you want to learn by appraising you on what significant other languages you could learn more easily on the basis of your future knowledge of Italian.

If you feel the figures listed in this table are not correct and you have learned one of the languages listed above, please feel free to contact me and let me know how this should be improved and why.