" Learning Italian as a first language would be extremely beneficial, as some commonplace words in Italian are more complex words in English. For example, the English “amorous” and the Italian “amoroso.” The Italian word is literally translated as the English “loving”. To learn to speak everyday Italian, you must know this word. However, the cognate in English is an advanced word. But since you already know it in Italian, you have a gigantic advantage."
Who has a gigantic advantage in English, the person who learned Italian and is now struggling to learn English? Or the person who is a native English speaker and is now struggling to learn Italian? I would say that the person who is a native English speaker would have the “advantage” in English.
I am a native English speaker and my partner is a native Korean speaker. I’m going to do my darndest to make sure that my kids will be natively bilingual in each language, but by far English is the most important. If I wanted them to learn Italian, a comparatively useless language, it would be as a “studied” language. It is much more important to have native fluency at English than Italian in nearly every country of the world except for a single pipsqueek socialist country where the youth can’t get jobs: Italy. Koreans spend 4 hours after school in private English academies, not Italian academies. That’s probably because they will grow up to be scientists, engineers, or businessmen, who read material like scientific journals which are almost always published in English, even in non-English speaking countries like Italy. The data they will have available to them on the internet by learning English instead of Italian is much larger.
Living in Korea I’ve witnessed what its like for people to be linguistically isolated. Koreans treat doctors like “seers” or messengers of the Gods, because they’ve never looked up an abstract on Pubmed before. The only information they get are medical textbooks translated into Korean, and as we know textbooks are outdated as soon as they’re printed. Nobody knows about Mises, Hayek, etc except for a handful of people and their works are extremely hard to get ahold of. Nobody knows about trends in health, science, and nutrition that have been discovered years ago because they don’t have access to the journals (they can’t read them). I on the other hand just type things into Google or Pubmed and a wealth of information pops up for me free, and it is all available in English online nearly as soon as it is discovered.
So that’s why I will want to ensure that my children grow up as native English speakers with a native-level, fluent command of the language. I think that is what actually creates a gigantic advantage.
PS: I travel all over Asia on business and have never met anyone who speaks Italian, other than an Italian-Swiss friend who speaks English and an Italian-French friend who also speaks English. If you want to do business in Shanghai, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Delhi, Manilla, or any other major hub you either use English or the local language. A Japanese person in Thailand will speak to a Thai in… English.