I’m learning Italian. I already know a bit of German and French, some Spanish and of course English too. Not much, but maybe enough so that it will make it a tiny bit easier for me to pick up the Italian vocabulary. So how much does it help me to know a few other languages, when starting to study Italian?

I know that studies have been made – several probably – about how many words are the same or almost the same across different languages. I think it’s called lexical transparency (no?). Anyways, I want to make my own study, so here we go.

In the tables below I've first picked around 400 of the most common Italian words - 100 verbs, 100 nouns, 100 adjectives and 100 adverbs.

Then I have used google translate to translate all 400 words into English, French, Spanish, and German.

Then I made a rough calculation of how close the translations where to the Italian word.

You can see the result below.

Oh, and by the way.. In this quite un-scientific study, Spanish came out as the winner... or at least as the language closest to Italian (if I'm not wrong, I've seen French listed as closer to Italian than Spanish in other, more valid studies before).