Hm well thats a good question, I personally speak German, and couple of weeks ago I started learning Italian. Well generally people think that German sound to harsh and not so very pleasant, but that totally not true. Thats just the wrong image people get watching those parody videos like how German sounds and so on. So when we cleared that, I think that Italian just like French ( that I also speak :)) is somewhat easier to learn because the grammar is not that complex, for example in German we have three genders Der, Die, Das, and basically you need to learn the gender for every none, and for me that was a big problem. And German languages has a lots and I mean a lots of synonyms. Well that was the grammar point. A part of that the Italian people are known as very friendly, welcoming, and romantic… Maybe that is the reason why would the people choose Italian over German, off cours from my point of view… 🙂