So I’ve seen a comment about learning Spanish making you get a little grip on Portugeese and Italian, my own language helps understand our neighbors.
I wonder, how to abuse that system for the most efficient pick of 3 or 4 languages to rule them all? Let the bar be just reading, text as simple as social media posts.
Again, not people (or we can just put this link, but languages treated as autonomous entities by science.
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That’s, while a noble idea, unfortunately impossible.
There’s simply too many languages. In india alone there is a ton of native languages, which have like maybe a thousand speakers each. Like, every village has their language, which often differs quite strongly from neighbouring villages. Same is true in many places in africa.
You kind of have to restrict yourself to certain languages which you actually intend to use. Otherwise it’s just unmanageable.
I know if you can read Chinese, you can “get the gist” of most Japanese writing and vice versa. I think a lot of east Asian languages trace their origin to or at least have borrowed a lot from China. So probably Mandarin?
I suppose you could go with Cantonese instead of Mandarin. I’m not sure if more languages have more in commom with Cantonese than Mandarin or not, but Mandarin is the second most spoken language on earth. So I’d think Mandarin would have a lot of utility.
This should fit your need, at least for Romance languages
I’ll start with the concept of Language Families. Read that article, it explains a lot.
Then look at the list of language families. You’ll start to see that what you’re asking is pretty complicated. I got this video from my library a while ago which is very good.
I would start from your “target” language groups and work back from that. I want to know Russian so I’ll learn that which will help with other Slavic and East Slavic languages languages.
I’ve not searched but I’m sure there are YT vids about language families too.
A whole bunch of slavik languages are very similar. I had an ex from Slovakia and she could reasonably communicate in Polish and Czech.
I’m a russian and I can understand written or spoken Ukrainian and Belarussian (although the last one is sadly dying), a side of Bulgarian and a little bit from other ex-USSR languages since they got their 20th century’s neologisms from Moscow. Trying to get news headlines on Slovakian, Serbian, Czech and Polish were hit-and-miss tho. Tons of different words, and I recognized mostly names, not verbs, the way I have it with almost any other language written with latin script’s forks.
You already have a gigantic head start with English. Everything you would want to read online is already in English
Except in France 😬
Source: my lil bro researcher.
