Italian – Spanish: Difficulties in Learning. A Survey of Literature

Abstract

Italian and Spanish are two languages with a very high degree of similarity. The aim of this article is to define what are the main difficulties that learners of both languages experience in learning the opposite foreign language. Transfer is one of the main causes of errors found in interlanguages, but it is crucial to analyze its effects specifically and understand that it is not the sole cause. The perceived closeness can have both positive and negative implications depending on the various stages of learning, which does not seem to have a constant increasing trend, and the initial confidence tends to disappear over time. The role of the first language is crucial in learning related languages that cannot avoid undergoing Contrastive Analysis, since learners must activate comparison with their own linguistic heritage in an effort to reduce the risk of error fossilization.