:smack: As a former student of Spanish, Portuguese and French, I knew that. Although “ay” is usually spoken as “eh” in English. I was actually thinking of the word “cantare”, rather than “contare”. For some reason, the song “Volare” was running in my head. :o
…Oh oh oh oh.
For beginning Italian, your first textual project would do well to learn “Volare.” It’s already familiar, the melody helps learning, and it’s reasonably easy for learners. As an incentive, the memorable scene in the film Room in Rome where “Volare” is sung.
Want to learn a Native American language? Don’t we all?
I suggest the best candidates are Ojibwe, Cree, and Quechua.
Ojibwe, being Algonquian, is relatively learner-friendly as to grammar and phonetics. Of the two Lenape languages, unfortunately, one is dead and the other’s gonna be dead soon. Ojibwe is still kicking and you could find native speakers to converse with. Plus, Ojibwe is one of the Central Algonquian languages. Just as learning, say, Italian makes the other Romance languages easier, so learning Ojibwe would also open up for you Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Algonquin, which are all of the Anishinaabe subgroup. Cree is widely spoken and sightly more distantly related to Anishinaabe. Advantage: Ojibwe.
Quechua is not only probably the most learner-friendly Native American language, it is still in robust health with a great many native speakers. Advantage: Quechua.
I like to study languages for fun. I am not an expert but I did get quite far with Russian. Once you master the alphabet (not that difficult) you have to put up with the declensions. In speech, they are so often elided that you don’t need to be perfect.
Italian is fun to speak – I was amazed how much I could pick up from a phrase book on the Corfu-Brindisi ferry. Brazilian is practically orgasmic to listen to. African languages are wonderfully musical to listen to, hear Lingala on music videos by Mbelia Bel or Mpongo Love. I took Inuit two semesters in college, it was a hoot and not that difficult. Whether a language is “fun” to learn can depend on the social environment where you are learning it.
If you’re going to learn Italian, don’t forget Italian opera!
My father was Irish but grew up with many Italian friends. He often joked he knew more Italian than my Italian mother. Both my parents were first generation Americans.
Pro tip: if you don’t want a deaf person to laugh at you, don’t ask how to conjugate the verb “to be” in ASL.
I had sort of the opposite experience, although not with ancient Greek. When I was in seminary, our Greek professor, on the last class before Christmas, brought in cookies and we spent the class reading the Nativity story in Koine Greek, which was fun. But I liked Greek. I didn’t learn it for fun, but it was fun learning it.
I have lost all of it now, apart from the opening line of the Gospel of John. I used to be moderately fluent in German (I spoke it with my grandmother), and could sort of muddle thru with French, after I learned to ignore the giggles from native speakers in Alsace-Lorraine. The one I would not recommend for fun is Hebrew. Greek was fun, German was easy, French was OK, Hebrew was walking face-first into a brick wall.
:whimpers plaintively: It’s backwards! There’s little marks and stuff and no verbs!
Another I sometimes thought would be fun and easy? Pidgin English. It is a trade language, designed to be easy to pick up, and I learned two charming words of it already. The word for “stomach ache” - himbellyallatimeburn.
And the word for friend - himbrotherbelongme.
Regards,
Shodan
Hebrew not only has verbs, it has a quite rich verbal morphology, as befits a somewhat classical Semitic language (cf. classical Arabic). Have a look at Gesenius’s Hebrew Grammar.
ETA maybe you’re thinking of Chinese with its lack of morphological differences?
I should add I know pig latin 
A song in Navajo: “Nihaa Shił Hózhǫ́” (I am happy about you).
This sentence is simple enough for me to parse.
Nihaa - ‘about you’ (2nd-person singular pronoun ni ‘you’ + a postposition).
shił - ‘with me’ (1st-person singular pronoun shí + ił ‘with’)
hózhǫ́ ‘it is beautiful’.
“A Beautiful Dawn” by Radmilla Cody: Couldn’t find the lyrics, but I could make out: nizhóní ‘it is beautiful’, kǫ́ǫ́ ‘around here’, hayííłką́ ‘dawn’.
C’mon, fess up - this actually means “the Third Armored Division attacks Bourgogne at dawn”.
Regards,
Shodan
Hej saluton!
I started learning Esperanto because it was easier than French. 
Given that I now live twenty minutes down the road from Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, I’m pondering exploring Mohawk. But Ojibwe is also on the list, since it is spoken near where I was born…
As I used to say in high school, “French is consistently misspelled. English is inconsistently misspelled…”
I started learning Esperanto as a quirky hobby in college (was going to organize the Official Esperanto Club so that I could get in the yearbook, with a photo of a classroom with just me in it) (like Natlamp’s HS Yearbook).
The line in the Esperanto book that cracked me up was:
"You can converse with ANYone in the WORLD,
as long as you both know the language!"
Umm, hello? Isn’t that true of any language?
I’ll echo the votes for a beautiful-sounding language, spoken somewhere you wouldn’t mind visiting. Italian, French, Spanish, Portugese … the rrrrromance languages.
I learned French, and even went to Paris for my honeymoon. And as a bonus, the French worked in Germany, too. We took a side-trip down the Mosel, and ended up asking a native if there was a restaurant in town. He didn’t speak English, but knew some French. Because neither of us were fluent, we both spoke slowly with easy words.
Way back in HS they told college bound kids to take French, the rest were told to take Spanish. Those were the 2 choices. Now my HS offers German too.
I have heard from several people that Indonesian is super easy to learn. It’s also kind of obscure to Westerners but useful enough as it’s a living language.
Oh, my god. I love it. Where/how does one learn Pidgin?
Are there different versions?
OH!! Related question: what’s the language that’s written like French spelled phonetically? I don’t know how else to describe it. I saw it at an international airport, on a sign in about a jillion tongues. Was utterly baffled, then out of boredom (it was a long line!) started sounding through it letter by letter and realized I was “speaking” French with rather decent pronunciation. All the weird vowel shenanigans were spelled right out for me.
Anyway, whatever that was? That seemed like a neat language to learn, all the fancy sounds of French without the WTF of their pronunciation.
There are many different Pidgins:
As far as I can make out, one of Shodan’s examples comes from Chinese Pidgin and one from Australian Pidgin.
By definition there are no first-language Pidgin speakers (if a Pidgin becomes a first language, it is called a Creole). It seems like the only version of Pidgin English that is seriously used today is Nigerian Pidgin. It’s widely spoken across Nigera.
Nigerian Pidgin spoken fast:
Some kind of Creole (Haiti? Reunion? Seychelles?) Unless it was really Catalan or something and not French at all.