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.
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.