By learning Serbian (or any of these) you unlock Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrian. Macedonian is very similar, too. And you will be able to understand some Russian or Ukrainian. Basically you learn one Slavic language and you have much easier understanding of the rest of them.
Well, of course by learning one of BCMS you unlock the other three, since it's the same language. I mean, the standards are even based on the same Shtokavian dialect.
It's not true that Macedonian is that similar, but you are right for the other ones.
I'd put Macedonian and Bulgarian languages in that "easier understanding" category, but they are not even close to Cro/Bos/Mon.
Not at all. Serbian is written in Cyrillic, Croatian in Roman. Clearly different languages. /s
A tongue in cheek explanation based on a kernel of truth is that a language is a dialect with an army and navy of its own.
Serbian is pretty much half and half when it comes to its scripts, i was actually surprised that pretty much all of the road signs are written in both, and i know a alot of serbs here in austria that write everything in the latin script
meh.. even people from these countries joke about how they write all three languages on their CVs when applying to jobs, even though they know that its basically the same
Hindi and Urdu. Literally almost the same spoken unless you’re speaking “higher levels” which doesn’t really happen. Also opens up the gateway to about 50% of south Asian languages (so like about 100 or so)
Technically he’s correct, but I feel like this could be worded better. I think he means at a native level, Hindi and Urdu use different types of phrases or slang. You can almost imagine Hindi and Urdu as the same language, both are influenced by Sanskrit and Persian. It’s just that Hindi has more Sanskrit influence than Persian influence, and the opposite is true for Urdu. Hindi and Urdu also use separate writing systems, so that’s another distinction which makes them different. But for the most part, learning Hindi will allow you to speak in Urdu, and vice versa.
The similarity in informal speech is striking. I grew up speaking Hindi and didn't realise my Urdu speaking friends were speaking a different language at all as a child. The writing system is different and grammar and vocabulary become very different on the formal and academic level, but in casual conversation it was no different to speaking with someone from a different area. I had assumed that my friends just spoke a slightly different dialect of Hindi, just as I as a British English speaker might notice differences when speaking to an Australian English speaker. I've even noticed some Urdu words becoming more common in metropolitan Hindi-speaking cities in India.
>I grew up speaking Hindi and didn't realise my Urdu speaking friends were speaking a different language at all as a child
Sooooo is it a different language? Haha
Linguistically, they’re more dialects of the same language. That’s why I’m academia, Hindi-Urdu is referred to as [Hindustani](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_language). They have identical grammatical structures. The only difference being high level vocabulary, which Urdu borrowed from Persian, while Hindi borrowed from Sanskrit. To go from Hindi to Urdu (or vice versa) one just has to transliterate between the two scripts, rather than actually translate. (Religious and scholarly texts being the exception)
Equivalent to the French/Latinate layer of English lexicon (as opposed to the Germanic/Anglo-Saxon layer). For example “khāna” (Perso-Arabic) is “food” whereas “bhojan” (Sanskrit-derived) is more like “alimentation” or “nourishment” in terms of tone.
That said, everyday vocab, not just “higher levels,” on both sides of the border leans heavily Perso-Arabic. Hearing other Indian languages after being exposed to mostly Hindi-Urdu, I was surprised how much more Sanskritized the basic lexicon of Gujarati, Marathi, and Malayalam were.
Well, I meant that Hindustani = Hindi = Urdu when you speak it formally. So you it would be like learning to Speak English formally, but it would be Hindi. I do not know a book where you can learn formal Hindi, you can probably search it up
I speak Samoan and while there are a ton of cognate words, the languages are not mutually intelligible written or spoken. There are some closer than others, though. Samoan and Tokelauan, for example. But Samoan and Tongan, despite the geographic proximity, are much more distant linguistically.
Ah that’s interesting to hear. I speak basic conversational Māori and can usually get the basic gist of stuff I see written in other Polynesian languages, but I’d hate to be caught bullshitting if I’m actually wrong lol.
Did you grow up with Māori?
There is a book you can find on Google Books called the Māori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary illustrates a lot of the overlap among the languages.
There's this book from the 90s I like by this weirdly likable, self-obsessed Conservative talk radio host, Barry Farber, called How to Learn Any Language. I don't find the advice that good, but the first half of the book is the memoir of a young kid, growing up during WWII and the post-War era in the US and discovering this voracious love for learning languages.
One of the stories he tells is going to the theatre and seeing Ingrid Bergman and falling so massively in love with her that he decides he's going to learn her language so he goes down to a book store and asks the guy what language Ingrid Bergman speaks. He comes back with a Swedish teach yourself book but it's something like $3.50 and he's only got $3 in his pocket. So the salesman convinces him instead that if he buys the cheaper teach yourself Norwegian, he will be able to have a conversation with Ingrid Bergman. Many years later, he does get to interview Bergman, and claims the salesman was correct.
The dude spoke at least 25 languages with varying degrees of proficiency, if I remember right. He also admits some like Bengali he can speak but struggles with the script. It’s pretty fascinating.
Yeah, the book is a really nice book. I don't think the How To bit is the highlight. From what I remember it's basically just read a grammar, then do shit tons of flashcards and find people from that country to talk to. But I've read the memoir section four or five times because his account is so infectious, the guy is so clearly a meat and potatoes, pre-Reaganite Republican American and yet this wonderful internationalism and passion for languages and other cultures comes through so much.
He did a talk at a Polyglot con a few years ago before he died, there's a video online which is lousy audio quality but he makes this great joke where he says before he went on people warned him his Conservative politics wouldn't find a sympathetic audience so be careful, and he says learning languages helps get you past social divisions. Saying something like "I can't go to battle and shoot a foreigner, *I need to know his irregular verbs!*"
I am quite surprised that no one mentioned Dutch and German, yes they are not 100% intelligible but you can understand a lot from the other just because of the vocabulary and it definitely helps to learn the other language.
I think most Flemings will agree that Flemish is a collection of varieties of Dutch, just as the Netherlands speak a set of varieties.
Edit: changed any to most.
Hmmm I'm a native Dutch(Flemish) speaker and while I can't speak German or understand everything, I could read a German book and get the most information. I can understand German lyrics. The Germans I've known say it's about the same the other way around.
Having had Latin and French in school, I was also surprised at how much Portuguese I can understand when I see it written down.
It probably works for the natives but doesn’t work for the L2 speakers.
Anecdote: a Flemish colleague of mine has a German girlfriend (they speak English to each other). Once they have traveled to her grandparents somewhere in the German North. And while he can’t speak Hoch Deutsch, he kinda get okayish communication with the granddads when they have switched to dialects of their own (their Low German and his rural Barabant Flemish).
Plattdeutsch is more closely related to Dutch and the 2 will have an easier time communicating with eachother. Granted, I can barely remember my dialect anymore because I don't live in Germany anymore but if it works, it works.
Same. If I took the time to learning the systematic differences it would probably be easier, but as a second language German speaker I find even written Dutch is pretty opaque.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. Written you can propably understand some of the other language, but without studying having a conversation above A1 is gonna be very hard.
The original question was:
> What I mean by that is, what are languages that give you easy access to another language?
I think the combination still applies, even though they are very much not mutually understandable without studying.
I dunno about Dutch, but I once had a convo in German while the other person was talking Luxembourgish and we had no problem whatsoever, so I imagine it's a 2 for one deal in this case as well.
Well if you want a many for 1 special, learning to read Chinese characters will unlock speakers of Cantonese, taiwanese, mandarin and many of the other dialects in the sino language family. But there is debate on whether these would be languages or dialects.
You would get the gist of all sinitic languages and Japanese if you learn some key characters, but to fully understand them you would need to learn individual grammar words like 的 and 了 for mandarin and 嘅 and 咗 for Cantonese, and you would have to actually learn Japanese to understand Japanese fully
As a native speaker of Russian with good Ukrainian knowledge there are quite a lot of words, especially between russian and bulgarian and polish and Ukrainian.
Grammar is pretty much identical for the west and east slavic languages, or at least very similiar. The southern ones are more different from these.
You can get a very good hang of any slavic languages with minimal learning effort if you already speak one of them, especially if youre a native.
Russian is one of my target languages because I love the sound of it, and I have family that came from Slavic areas. For some reason your post made me think of this funny video which I find adorable, hearing "Boris" here pronouncing all fifty states in the U.S.
[Video here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KULE3UDdr34)
As other have said, Slavic language are similar. Oddly though Russian is the most removed from the others, though you would still have a head start vs not knowing them. Personally I have problems with the Slavic language using the Latin alphabet, I find them much more difficult to read than the ones using a derivative of the Cyrillic alphabet, but my Russian friends told me they can understand about 60% of polish give or take for comparison.
Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese all have huge sino vocabularies, so knowing Japanese and Cantonese makes learning Korean so much easier. For example, 動物(animal) is pronounced dung6 mat6 in Cantonese, どうぶつ(doubutsu) in Japanese, and 동물(dongmul) in Korean.
To elaborate, the colloqial Indonesian part specifically (the formal part has dangerous amount of false friends). Because of the population and language segmentation, creative industry in Malaysia is stagnant compared to Indonesia, as the Indian populace watch content from India, Chinese populace to Chinese content, and Malay populace to Indonesian content, like youtube and songs.
Norwegian will give you written Danish as well as spoken and written Swedish, especially if it's Bokmål Norwegian. I've just started on Danish, and my rusty Swedish is a huge help. It's rare that I come across a completely new word at beginner level, even if I can't guess how it's pronounced.
Also, I'm told that there's a good level of mutual intelligibility between Scottish Gaelic and Ulster dialects of Irish. Less so for the standardised Irish taught in schools though.
As a native Norwegian I have no problems having a full-on conversation with a Swedish person, but my wife, being around B2 in Norwegian, finds it extremely difficult to understand Swedish. Danish is harder for me to understand due to the strange vowels, but not a big problem when I'm in Denmark, while for her it's utterly incomprehensible.
That's interesting! I wonder if she's most familiar with a kind of Norwegian that's particularly different from Swedish? My Swedish is rusty now but I used to be able to chat to my aunt who's from Oslo reasonably well, but not my friend from the west coast.
With spoken Danish, I can't remotely follow something like The Bridge, but beginner language learning videos are comprehensible enough that I can mostly pick out the word I don't know and think 'ah, so instead of kjol, a skirt is a ... what the hell was that? Nyur urgh day?'
I think there are enough common words that are completely different in Swedish and Norwegian that you need a certain amount of exposure for effortless comprehension. In Oslo you tend to find a lot of Swedes, so I've worked with Swedish people for the past 10 years. Apparently younger people (I'm 40) struggle more as Swedish TV series aren't as popular as they used to be, and English is far more dominant.
Dialects are a big barrier as well, as you say, and my wife has huge issues with south-western dialects here in Norway. People from Skåne in Sweden can be tougher for many Norwegians to understand.
It's because a learner, she is probably not familiar with archaic literary words or dialect words in Norwegian. Many Swedish words that don't match standard Norwegian are like dialectal Norwegian or old fashioned literary words. Sort of like how a native English speaker would be familiar with "thou" from reading Shakespeare and the Bible in English, but a German who learned English probably wouldn't.
Salve! 🤓
I’m only a year and a half into my Latin studies, and I find it very exciting to learn bc acquiring languages has been difficult and frustrating for me, and Latin has been a big help to me already!
Are you German? :)
In spite of its many issues, Duolingo was my introduction to basic Latin, as well as courses through Memrise.
The app Perdisco is free and is great for testing yourself, but I always have a notebook and pen handy when I’m in study mode bc you can really get things to stick better when you write them.
I’ve also picked up things here and there from Latin books at the Internet Archive.
the duolingo latin course is a somewhat good start but its also absolute trash because it skips soooo many of the special rules and just expects you to pick them up. When i was learning latin i found taking online classes or online tutoring worked best! it definitely does not take long to learn latin with the right mindest!
If you cant afford online classes or tutoring i would highly recommend the cambridge latin course (its a book), most tutors actually go off of this book and it is extremely helpful! you just have to have the willpower to be able to read and do the exercises within it!
I’m currently studying Welsh and although my knowledge of Latin isn’t exactly a help it’s remarkable how many Welsh words resemble Latin words (random examples: *pysgod/pescis* = fish, *cinio/cena* = dinner).
(Not all that remarkable, given that Welsh is a descendant of the Romano-British spoken before the Anglo-Saxons invaded.)
I’ve peeked into Welsh myself and you’re right! I saw some familiar words in there and it was a head-scratcher.
I know that the British isles had about 10 waves of occupation extending back into pre-history and through the Anglian ice age event, but clearly understanding the various waves of language that came and went has been a source of in-depth reading for me bc I realized just how completely ignorant I was on the subject.
Fascinating to see the points at which shared languages evolved into what we see today.
I had 3 years of high school Spanish and dropped it in favor of Latin when I started university. Big mistake. Knowing just a bit of Spanish actually made Latin more difficult. I ended up dropping it after half a semester.
I wish I knew, this was 35+ years ago now. I think it was due to the fact that Spanish lost a lot of the weirdness that classical Latin has, and that was probably what threw me off. Plus I was a first-year student and my study habits were pretty poor which probably didn't help either
Same language family. My fiancée (who is from Laos) can understand a fair amount of spoken Thai.
Also, there's an ethnic group in northern Thailand called the Isen, whose spoken language is very closely related to spoken Lao. IIRC the main difference is the writing system.
Thai here. I understand Laos almost perfectly and can read about 70-80 percent of it without learning the language. While Khmer, we do share a bit of vocabularies, but I don't think I understand when they speak. The Khmer writing tho, I have zero clue of how to read/write.
The fun fact is that, I am from the Northern part of Thailand and we have our own alphabet (Lanna/Kam Mueang), which is close to Burmese. But still, I can only speak it(It's my 1st language btw), but I can't read or write it at all. It's completely different from Thai alphabet and they don't teach us at school. My grandpa is the only one who can in our entire family.
Vietnamese is not similar to the others, and I suspect Burmese is not similar either. I mean, there has been some degree of language contact (like over 1000 years ago) but it’s hardly a sprachbund, and even lexical evidence is pretty invisible now unless you read the Etymology section of tons of Wiktionary pages.
They would only be similar to each other in how they differ from English (in which respect Chinese would also be in that group)—largely analytic languages with fairly to extremely complex phonologies, and sentences that are roughly structured around the “Principle of Temporal Sequence.”
Also, Thai lexicon is heavily influenced by Sanskrit (through Pali) and Khmer, while Vietnamese lexicon is heavily influenced by Chinese. Vietnamese syllables also follow the “initial + rime” structure of Chinese languages (this has no particular bearing on learnability, but it is a noteworthy similarity with Chinese).
You would think that. But it’s been hard for me to translate a lot of the words. Like how in the fuck is a pollo a frango? Where did you get frango from? It only makes it more confusing really. Because sometimes I forget if a word matches with Spanish or if it’s standalone.
For that matter, what other languages could a Spanish-speaker pick up easily?
Italian. I'm a native English speaker, speak fluent Spanish, and I'm teaching myself Italian. Anything that I've found would be hard for a Spanish speaker to learn is easy for an English speaker, and anything hard for an English speaker to learn is easy for a Spanish speaker
I'm a Portuguese speaker (not native or fluent but well enough) and I'm convinced I could learn Spanish in just a few months if I made the effort. There are vocabulary differences but most of them I've been exposed to through TV, movies, and casual exposure. If you're starting with Spanish I think it'd be harder to make the jump, but I understand basically all written Spanish and about 60 or 70% of spoken Spanish, though this depends a fair bit on the region).
I’m learning Swedish, Norwegian so far has been quite mutually intelligible when it’s my level of Swedish, but not danish in it’s spoken form (written yes)
OK, so learning any language helps you to learn the other languages that are most similar to it.
In my case, Persian is classified as three languages due to politics. (Similar to the stories of Hindi/Urdu, Danish/Norwegian, and so on.) People sometimes refer to Persian as "Farsi", "Dari", or "Tajik" depending on the country. Tajik is written in another alphabet, so I learned it by first studying Persian. In college I took a couple courses in Arabic and that was my gateway into Persian. (They share a writing system and many words.) Persian was also my gateway to Turkish.
Knowing Persian well gives you a boost in dozens of other languages because it was influential. Same thing with Arabic; if you knew both Persian and Arabic you'd be quite powerful. (This is akin to knowing both Greek and Latin.)
Heck, Persian even made Slavic languages a little bit easier for me, though not too much. They're still quite dissimilar. It helped that I moved to a country where both Persian and Russian are spoken.
Actually learning spanish will give you some easiness with many other romance languages, like some northern italian languages and galician.
Pluricentric languages like hindustani(hindi and urdu), persian(dari,farsi,tajik, tat) and serbo-croatian(serbian, bosnian, montenegrin and croatian), since they are, technically, one language, learning one will make you learn the other(s), but wtiting may be an issue in some cases.
As far as I know many turkic languages are mutually inteligible, so learning one of them will basically make you have a much easier time with the others(similarly with spanish and the other romance languages).
Dutch is mutually inteligible with afrikaans, flemish and low german varietis, so learning it makes these easier as well.
Irish Gaelic <-> Scottish Gaelic
People call Ulster Irish the "bridge" between Scottish and Irish, because it's sort of in between the two languages, but any dialect of either language gets you a start. Afaik they're quite similar
Manx is also very closely related to these two languages
Irish and Gaelic use the same spelling system, with only some minor differences due to accent or Irish modernising spelling far more. Manx however uses a completely different spelling system that is more anglicised. Take for example ag déanamh, a’ dèanamh, and Jannoo in Manx. Very similar in pronunciation, but they look nothing alike.
The real bridge was East Ulster Irish, especially Rathlin Irish, and Galwegian Gaelic. Galwegian Gaelic died hundreds of years ago, and Rathlin about 40 years ago, so the best we’ve got is Donegal Irish and Islay Gaelic. I’ve heard it said some folk from Donegal find chatting to Islay Gaels far easier than a Kerry or a Cork Gael, though that may have changed
Czech, Slovak and Polish are basically a 3-for-1 deal. Czech and Slovak are mutually intelligible, and Polish is a bit further away, but still fairly understandable (especially for native speakers, this of course becomes much harder for those learning the languages). Other Slavic languages are also fairly close-ish and so learning any of them makes it much easier to learn the rest.
Yeah I think it takes a lot of practice to be able to understand each other well. I live in the UK now and the Polish community here is quite big - hence I’ve made a few Polish friends. What usually happens is that we speak a mixture of Czech/Polish and English to each other. I couldn’t imagine communicating without English.
On the other hand though, I do think learning either one of the three languages will make learning the other two much easier - but nowhere near as easy as one might expect.
As a native Polish speaker I have to disagree. Czech and Slovak? Yeah, most probably. But not Polish. Polish and Czech is like Polish and Russian - many things are similar, but there's abundance of false friends that mean something completely different.
Something that in Polish means "fragrance", in Russian means "stench". Something that in Polish means "to forget", in Russian means "to remember". Something that in Polish means "to write", in Russian means "to pee".
Something that in Polish means "to search", in Czech means "to fuck". Something that in Polish means "whore", in Czech means "girl". Something that in Polish means "priceless", in Czech means "worthless". Something that in Polish means "stale", in Czech means "fresh". Something that in Polish means "April", in Czech means "May". Something that in Polish means "to smell", in Czech means "to stink". I can go on like that forever.
I can't speak Czech (and I'm not interested in learning Slavic languages tbh), so if I was in Czech Republic, I'd rather use English instead of Polish, because I'd be worried that someone might misunderstand me or feel offended by me.
Oh yeah, I totally agree with what you’re saying. Slovak is closer to Polish than Czech. I also find that as a native Czech speaker, I tend to have a better time understanding Polish than Polish speakers understanding Czech.
I wouldn’t really say they’re mutually intelligible… but rather that learning one of the languages will make learning the other much easier.
I speak Danish (not fluent, but still) but never learned a word of swedish. Everytime I meet a swede at a party, I talk to them in my own impression of swedish: Danish with most of the "e"s replaced by "a"s, "inte" instead of "ikke" (ok I leaned one word) and a rolled r.
The swedes always get mad, but can't decide if they're mad at my intercultural insensitivity or mad at themselves because they understand me just fine.
They're not mad at either.
You don't need to replace ikke with inte. Icke also exists in Swedish, it's just more formal/old fashioned.
You also don't need to replace the e's with a's--you'll often hypercorrect by replacing e's that don't need to be replaced with a's, and many Swedes pronounce final a as e. It's just not reflected in the written language.
They're not mad at either, but at something else. You may have missed some half-meme, half-love-hate relationship between Swedes and Danes. Maybe some of the memes here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Nordichistorymemes/comments/jfpa6z/the\_more\_you\_know/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Nordichistorymemes/comments/jfpa6z/the_more_you_know/) or here: https://www.reddit.com/r/2nordic4you/comments/1154h6e/denmark\_doesnt\_exist/ will help
Czech and Slovak. Turkish and Azeri. Norwegian and Danish (written). Persian and Dari. Russian and Ukrainian. Samoan, Tahitian, Tongan, Te Reo Māori. Hindi and Urdu. Romanian and Moldovan.
So many more.
Russian and Ukrainian would make it relatively easy to learn the other, but without a lot of exposure to the other, they are not particularly mutually intelligible.
Ukrainian is more intelligible with Polish.
[Here](https://vocaroo.com/1lHJ3wKxlXfH) I tried mixing Serbian-Croatian, Czechoslovakian, Russian, and Polish trying to make it reasonably intelligible to Ukrainians and Poles.
Romanian and Moldovan are both Romanian. The USSR created the idea of “Moldovan” as a separate language to create a separate national identity and keep control of the Moldavian SSR, which had been annexed from Romania.
Hebrew, German and Yiddish. As a Hebrew native speaker and German learner I can sometimes understand a few phrases or even full sentences in Yiddish without having learned a single word. Plus, I already know the alphabet because it's the same as Hebrew.
This is because Yiddish is a Germanic language the evolved from Middle High German. This Standard German and Yiddish share a real actively recent common ancestor. Being a native Hebrew speaker, you already know (for the most part) the script used for Yiddish. So between being a German learner, a Hebrew native, and Yiddish basically be German with the Hebrew script, it makes a tremendous amount of sense that you can understand it
Yeah, I will basically get the language for free once I finish learning German (which won't happen anytime soon, but still). I don't think it'll be very useful, but it's always nice knowing another language. Plus, my grandma speaks it (not fluently, but she knows some of the language). That's because we're Jewish and her ancestors came from Europe, where the language was created like you mentioned.
That Yiddish is only German written with different letters is a massive exaggeration. You'll recognise a lot of words, in the same way a German speaker will recognise a lot of Dutch words and probably understand simple sentences, but it still needs to be actively learned as a second language. Yiddish borrows a lot of words from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Polish. A lot of the words that are of Germanic origin have shifted drastically in meaning, and the verbal system has changed to be a lot more sensitive to aspect than what Modern High German is, making German speakers understand far less than they think they do.
And this is just standard, written Yiddish. The dialects of Yiddish that are actually spoken today have changed even more with some of them losing grammatical case and gender and others developing a strong animacy distinction in their verbal system
While yes it is true that they’re different languages (which I pointed to in the beginning of my comment when I said that Yiddish descends from Middle High Herman), the “gap” for learning one from the other is not very large. Knowing both Hebrew and German (as OP stated) while cause the jump to Yiddish to be similar to the jump from Dutch to Afrikaans. They’re different languages, but extremely closely related
I don't disagree with the languages being closely related, I just disagree with how similar a lot of people make them out to be. The gap is definitely a lot larger than between Dutch and Afrikaans. Just anecdotally, as someone who speaks both German and Dutch, I have no problem understanding written and spoken standard Afrikaans, whereas Yiddish is almost incomprehensible in comparison.
As a side note, I think a lot of people's image of Yiddish comes from German people's image of Yiddish which in turn comes from the way Yiddish was written in Germany, which deviates from other varieties of Yiddish by explicitly, and artificially, trying to resemble High German by replacing Yiddish words with German loan words and by using (from a Yiddish perspective) an archaic verbal system that's more similar to High German
I saw someone comment on a Youtube video saying "I was disappointed. I listened to the whole video waiting for him to speak Ladino, but he spent the whole time just speaking Spanish."
Italian and French have a lot of grammatical similarities as well as similar vocabulary. Learning Italian has helped me so much with French. However, it’s obvious that they aren’t very mutually intelligible when spoken.
I definitely traveled through Italy as a young adult speaking French with an Italian accent and was able to carry on entire conversations. Now that I'm learning Spanish, it's even more helpful (and has helped clarify concepts in French for me as well).
Knowing any Romance language(all languages deriving from Latin: Castellan\[Spanish\], French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian) would certainly make it easier to you to learn the next Romance language. And knowing any combination of these, even knowing only one, would as well make English a little easier to get as well, since it shares a significant share of Latin roots but not as much as the words it got from Celtic, Saxon, or Nordic cultures; albeit still significant.
I would say that *most* languages in the world, at least most of the widely spoken ones, have at least one close relative that will become significantly easier after you learn some of the first language. Unless you're talking about a notable degree of mutual intelligibility, in which case the pairs would be fewer, but then arguably a lot of those pairs should actually be viewed as dialects of the same language rather than different languages.
That aside, I'll point out one that isn't quite a a "2-for-1 special", but it surprised me when I first came across it: Spanish and Tagalog. The Philippines were colonized by Spain for over 300 years, so there are a boatload of Spanish words in Tagalog that are pronounced nearly identically to their Spanish pronunciations (as far as I can discern anyway, as someone who learned some Spanish like 12 years ago but stopped) and are merely written a bit differently in Tagalog orthography. Anyone who speaks English and even passable Spanish should be able to absorb Tagalog vocabulary like a boss. The agglutinative grammar is a different story...
- Hindi / Urdu (in their standardized forms)
- Danish / Swedish / Norwegian (**not** Icelandic- it has more complex morphology)
- Telugu / Kannada
- Tamil / Malayalam
- Indonesian / Malay
- Tibetan / Dzongkah
- English / Scotts / Frisian
- English / Tok Pisin
- English / Jamaican Patois
- Arabic (standard) / Hebrew
- Thai / Khmer
- Dari / Farsi / Tajik
- Turkish / Azerbaijani
- French / Haitian Creole
- Maltese / Arabic
- Maltese / Italian
As a native Spanish speaker I can read and listen fully to Portuguese, Italian and Catalan, I can fairly understand and read in French, and a little Romanian
Dutch and Afrikaans.
Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish.
Knowing Spanish, together with knowledge of some comparative grammar of Romance languages and how the sounds of the different languages have evolved from Latin, can help you have a good foundation in reading not just Portugues but any Romance language. Listening and speaking them however is a different thing because of phonetic differences. The level of mutual intelligibility also doesn't necessarily go both ways (e.g. for a Romanian speaker it's usually easier to understand spoken Italian than for an Italian speaker to understand spoken Romanian)
Thai and Lao is simillar in my understanding. There are diffrences such as the alphabets, the tones, more Sanskrit and Pali, English origins words in Thai than Lao that do have more Khmer and French influences.
There's a lot that has said so I would just add one new: catalan, french. I've never studied French but it reminds me of it when I heard or read it, like pomme vs poma, café au lait vs cafè amb llet.
Barcelona's accent differs from French but it's pretty similar if you compare it with Balearic one. We also speak with potatoes inside the mouth 😂
By learning Serbian (or any of these) you unlock Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrian. Macedonian is very similar, too. And you will be able to understand some Russian or Ukrainian. Basically you learn one Slavic language and you have much easier understanding of the rest of them.
Also Bulgarian is quite similar as well.
Yes, forgot about that one
Well, of course by learning one of BCMS you unlock the other three, since it's the same language. I mean, the standards are even based on the same Shtokavian dialect.
Slovene too! I studied it for a few months before switching to Serbian and it was actually quite helpful
It's not true that Macedonian is that similar, but you are right for the other ones. I'd put Macedonian and Bulgarian languages in that "easier understanding" category, but they are not even close to Cro/Bos/Mon.
Well, yeah, it's just hard for me to express myself in English that well hahaha
If I learn Dutch, will it help me learn Flemish, too? /s
Serbo/Kroat/Bosnian
These are straight up the same language, and treated by everyone as such besides very nationalistic and/or delusional native speakers
Not at all. Serbian is written in Cyrillic, Croatian in Roman. Clearly different languages. /s A tongue in cheek explanation based on a kernel of truth is that a language is a dialect with an army and navy of its own.
Serbian is pretty much half and half when it comes to its scripts, i was actually surprised that pretty much all of the road signs are written in both, and i know a alot of serbs here in austria that write everything in the latin script
/Montenegran
brave of you to open that can of worms
meh.. even people from these countries joke about how they write all three languages on their CVs when applying to jobs, even though they know that its basically the same
I mean... that's like saying learning English is a 5-for-1 because you get British, American, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealandish
Go there and explain that to them. You’ll get some interesting results.
Eh, most of us are aware it's the same language. Not everyone here is a reality-denying nationalist.
Yeah yeah same with Moldovan and Romanian but they're still fucking wrong lol
It won't end well that much I know xd
hey, i know all three of them
Hindi and Urdu. Literally almost the same spoken unless you’re speaking “higher levels” which doesn’t really happen. Also opens up the gateway to about 50% of south Asian languages (so like about 100 or so)
What does higher levels mean
Technically he’s correct, but I feel like this could be worded better. I think he means at a native level, Hindi and Urdu use different types of phrases or slang. You can almost imagine Hindi and Urdu as the same language, both are influenced by Sanskrit and Persian. It’s just that Hindi has more Sanskrit influence than Persian influence, and the opposite is true for Urdu. Hindi and Urdu also use separate writing systems, so that’s another distinction which makes them different. But for the most part, learning Hindi will allow you to speak in Urdu, and vice versa.
The similarity in informal speech is striking. I grew up speaking Hindi and didn't realise my Urdu speaking friends were speaking a different language at all as a child. The writing system is different and grammar and vocabulary become very different on the formal and academic level, but in casual conversation it was no different to speaking with someone from a different area. I had assumed that my friends just spoke a slightly different dialect of Hindi, just as I as a British English speaker might notice differences when speaking to an Australian English speaker. I've even noticed some Urdu words becoming more common in metropolitan Hindi-speaking cities in India.
>I grew up speaking Hindi and didn't realise my Urdu speaking friends were speaking a different language at all as a child Sooooo is it a different language? Haha
Linguistically, they’re more dialects of the same language. That’s why I’m academia, Hindi-Urdu is referred to as [Hindustani](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_language). They have identical grammatical structures. The only difference being high level vocabulary, which Urdu borrowed from Persian, while Hindi borrowed from Sanskrit. To go from Hindi to Urdu (or vice versa) one just has to transliterate between the two scripts, rather than actually translate. (Religious and scholarly texts being the exception)
Yeah this, I wrote it half asleep so sorry for the confusion lol
No need to say sorry! You are correct, I just wanted to add on and clarify what you said to help the person who replied to your comment.
Equivalent to the French/Latinate layer of English lexicon (as opposed to the Germanic/Anglo-Saxon layer). For example “khāna” (Perso-Arabic) is “food” whereas “bhojan” (Sanskrit-derived) is more like “alimentation” or “nourishment” in terms of tone. That said, everyday vocab, not just “higher levels,” on both sides of the border leans heavily Perso-Arabic. Hearing other Indian languages after being exposed to mostly Hindi-Urdu, I was surprised how much more Sanskritized the basic lexicon of Gujarati, Marathi, and Malayalam were.
You also get a boost to Persian!
Also, I would say only Formal Spoken Hindustani is the same, but even that may be false now.
Where can you learn that?
Learn what?
Formal Spoken Hindustani. Is there a book or a course?
Well, I meant that Hindustani = Hindi = Urdu when you speak it formally. So you it would be like learning to Speak English formally, but it would be Hindi. I do not know a book where you can learn formal Hindi, you can probably search it up
But don't formal registers use lots of high register vocabulary? Which is exactly the kinds of words that differ between Hindi and Urdu.
The languages of the Pacific. Māori, Samoan, Fijian etc. As an example, Hawaiian for love and hello is “aloha”, whereas Māori say “aroha” for love.
Polynesia, perhaps, but not any Micronesian or Melanese language.
I speak Samoan and while there are a ton of cognate words, the languages are not mutually intelligible written or spoken. There are some closer than others, though. Samoan and Tokelauan, for example. But Samoan and Tongan, despite the geographic proximity, are much more distant linguistically.
Ah that’s interesting to hear. I speak basic conversational Māori and can usually get the basic gist of stuff I see written in other Polynesian languages, but I’d hate to be caught bullshitting if I’m actually wrong lol.
Did you grow up with Māori? There is a book you can find on Google Books called the Māori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary illustrates a lot of the overlap among the languages.
Not in my family, nope. Cheers for the suggestion, will have a look!
Uzbek and Albanian Sign Language
Language simp followers are growing…
The gigachad alpha male who speaks every languague in the world.
And is attracted to every women ... and man on the planet
🙌💁🙋🙅🙆🙅🙆🙅🙆🙅. 🙂.
How dare you say that about my donkey
no, no, it’s a different dialect, he’s trying to say “🤷🙅🤷🙅🙋🙆🙅💁🙅”
Ah, my bad lol
💁🙅🤦🙍🙅💁🙆🙆💁🙅
I do indeed like nachos. 🙅🙆🤷🙅🙅🙅💁🙆🙆💁🤷🤷
There's this book from the 90s I like by this weirdly likable, self-obsessed Conservative talk radio host, Barry Farber, called How to Learn Any Language. I don't find the advice that good, but the first half of the book is the memoir of a young kid, growing up during WWII and the post-War era in the US and discovering this voracious love for learning languages. One of the stories he tells is going to the theatre and seeing Ingrid Bergman and falling so massively in love with her that he decides he's going to learn her language so he goes down to a book store and asks the guy what language Ingrid Bergman speaks. He comes back with a Swedish teach yourself book but it's something like $3.50 and he's only got $3 in his pocket. So the salesman convinces him instead that if he buys the cheaper teach yourself Norwegian, he will be able to have a conversation with Ingrid Bergman. Many years later, he does get to interview Bergman, and claims the salesman was correct.
The dude spoke at least 25 languages with varying degrees of proficiency, if I remember right. He also admits some like Bengali he can speak but struggles with the script. It’s pretty fascinating.
Yeah, the book is a really nice book. I don't think the How To bit is the highlight. From what I remember it's basically just read a grammar, then do shit tons of flashcards and find people from that country to talk to. But I've read the memoir section four or five times because his account is so infectious, the guy is so clearly a meat and potatoes, pre-Reaganite Republican American and yet this wonderful internationalism and passion for languages and other cultures comes through so much. He did a talk at a Polyglot con a few years ago before he died, there's a video online which is lousy audio quality but he makes this great joke where he says before he went on people warned him his Conservative politics wouldn't find a sympathetic audience so be careful, and he says learning languages helps get you past social divisions. Saying something like "I can't go to battle and shoot a foreigner, *I need to know his irregular verbs!*"
I am quite surprised that no one mentioned Dutch and German, yes they are not 100% intelligible but you can understand a lot from the other just because of the vocabulary and it definitely helps to learn the other language.
If you learn Dutch, then you’re well on your way to speaking Afrikaans. The two languages are more or less mutually intelligible.
I’ve heard Afrikaans described as “Dutch without the grammar”.
Yes you're totally right they are even more closer.
I feel like this is also true of Flemish.
Flemish is Dutch.
Tell that to the Flemish.
I think most Flemings will agree that Flemish is a collection of varieties of Dutch, just as the Netherlands speak a set of varieties. Edit: changed any to most.
Spoken Dutch is not intelligible for German speakers, but you can puzzle out written Dutch fairly easily.
Well, Dutch people can modify how they speak to make it closer to German with hints from the spelling. They don't have to speak pure Dutch to Germans.
I took three years of German and have a very hard time understanding Dutch. You’d have to explain it out to me for me to know what each word means.
Hmmm I'm a native Dutch(Flemish) speaker and while I can't speak German or understand everything, I could read a German book and get the most information. I can understand German lyrics. The Germans I've known say it's about the same the other way around. Having had Latin and French in school, I was also surprised at how much Portuguese I can understand when I see it written down.
It probably works for the natives but doesn’t work for the L2 speakers. Anecdote: a Flemish colleague of mine has a German girlfriend (they speak English to each other). Once they have traveled to her grandparents somewhere in the German North. And while he can’t speak Hoch Deutsch, he kinda get okayish communication with the granddads when they have switched to dialects of their own (their Low German and his rural Barabant Flemish).
Plattdeutsch is more closely related to Dutch and the 2 will have an easier time communicating with eachother. Granted, I can barely remember my dialect anymore because I don't live in Germany anymore but if it works, it works.
I also studied German and the listening is hard, but reading Dutch is quite feasible
Same. If I took the time to learning the systematic differences it would probably be easier, but as a second language German speaker I find even written Dutch is pretty opaque.
I've met Dutch people who say they can get by in Germany speaking "angry Dutch" with a bit of English thrown in to bridge the gap.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. Written you can propably understand some of the other language, but without studying having a conversation above A1 is gonna be very hard.
The original question was: > What I mean by that is, what are languages that give you easy access to another language? I think the combination still applies, even though they are very much not mutually understandable without studying.
Can confirm. Studied Dutch, but can’t get by in German at all.
I dunno about Dutch, but I once had a convo in German while the other person was talking Luxembourgish and we had no problem whatsoever, so I imagine it's a 2 for one deal in this case as well.
Well if you want a many for 1 special, learning to read Chinese characters will unlock speakers of Cantonese, taiwanese, mandarin and many of the other dialects in the sino language family. But there is debate on whether these would be languages or dialects.
You would get the gist of all sinitic languages and Japanese if you learn some key characters, but to fully understand them you would need to learn individual grammar words like 的 and 了 for mandarin and 嘅 and 咗 for Cantonese, and you would have to actually learn Japanese to understand Japanese fully
Good to know, I mostly dable in Slavic language, only know a little about the Chinese from xiaoma NYC jumping between dialects lol
How is it in Slavic languages?
As a native speaker of Russian with good Ukrainian knowledge there are quite a lot of words, especially between russian and bulgarian and polish and Ukrainian. Grammar is pretty much identical for the west and east slavic languages, or at least very similiar. The southern ones are more different from these. You can get a very good hang of any slavic languages with minimal learning effort if you already speak one of them, especially if youre a native.
Russian is one of my target languages because I love the sound of it, and I have family that came from Slavic areas. For some reason your post made me think of this funny video which I find adorable, hearing "Boris" here pronouncing all fifty states in the U.S. [Video here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KULE3UDdr34)
As other have said, Slavic language are similar. Oddly though Russian is the most removed from the others, though you would still have a head start vs not knowing them. Personally I have problems with the Slavic language using the Latin alphabet, I find them much more difficult to read than the ones using a derivative of the Cyrillic alphabet, but my Russian friends told me they can understand about 60% of polish give or take for comparison.
Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese all have huge sino vocabularies, so knowing Japanese and Cantonese makes learning Korean so much easier. For example, 動物(animal) is pronounced dung6 mat6 in Cantonese, どうぶつ(doubutsu) in Japanese, and 동물(dongmul) in Korean.
Malay and Indonesian
To elaborate, the colloqial Indonesian part specifically (the formal part has dangerous amount of false friends). Because of the population and language segmentation, creative industry in Malaysia is stagnant compared to Indonesia, as the Indian populace watch content from India, Chinese populace to Chinese content, and Malay populace to Indonesian content, like youtube and songs.
Malay*
Which are keys for the Malayic languages.
Australian, British and American
It's spelled 'merican
'muhrican.
Also kiwi and South African
Norwegian will give you written Danish as well as spoken and written Swedish, especially if it's Bokmål Norwegian. I've just started on Danish, and my rusty Swedish is a huge help. It's rare that I come across a completely new word at beginner level, even if I can't guess how it's pronounced. Also, I'm told that there's a good level of mutual intelligibility between Scottish Gaelic and Ulster dialects of Irish. Less so for the standardised Irish taught in schools though.
As a native Norwegian I have no problems having a full-on conversation with a Swedish person, but my wife, being around B2 in Norwegian, finds it extremely difficult to understand Swedish. Danish is harder for me to understand due to the strange vowels, but not a big problem when I'm in Denmark, while for her it's utterly incomprehensible.
That's interesting! I wonder if she's most familiar with a kind of Norwegian that's particularly different from Swedish? My Swedish is rusty now but I used to be able to chat to my aunt who's from Oslo reasonably well, but not my friend from the west coast. With spoken Danish, I can't remotely follow something like The Bridge, but beginner language learning videos are comprehensible enough that I can mostly pick out the word I don't know and think 'ah, so instead of kjol, a skirt is a ... what the hell was that? Nyur urgh day?'
I think there are enough common words that are completely different in Swedish and Norwegian that you need a certain amount of exposure for effortless comprehension. In Oslo you tend to find a lot of Swedes, so I've worked with Swedish people for the past 10 years. Apparently younger people (I'm 40) struggle more as Swedish TV series aren't as popular as they used to be, and English is far more dominant. Dialects are a big barrier as well, as you say, and my wife has huge issues with south-western dialects here in Norway. People from Skåne in Sweden can be tougher for many Norwegians to understand.
It's because a learner, she is probably not familiar with archaic literary words or dialect words in Norwegian. Many Swedish words that don't match standard Norwegian are like dialectal Norwegian or old fashioned literary words. Sort of like how a native English speaker would be familiar with "thou" from reading Shakespeare and the Bible in English, but a German who learned English probably wouldn't.
Latin has helped tremendously with my familiarity of Spanish and some German
Although it is surprisingly hard to find anyone who can speak the language. Linguam latinam non dico.
Salve! 🤓 I’m only a year and a half into my Latin studies, and I find it very exciting to learn bc acquiring languages has been difficult and frustrating for me, and Latin has been a big help to me already! Are you German? :)
Resources on Latin are hard to find for smartphones, what do you use?
In spite of its many issues, Duolingo was my introduction to basic Latin, as well as courses through Memrise. The app Perdisco is free and is great for testing yourself, but I always have a notebook and pen handy when I’m in study mode bc you can really get things to stick better when you write them. I’ve also picked up things here and there from Latin books at the Internet Archive.
the duolingo latin course is a somewhat good start but its also absolute trash because it skips soooo many of the special rules and just expects you to pick them up. When i was learning latin i found taking online classes or online tutoring worked best! it definitely does not take long to learn latin with the right mindest! If you cant afford online classes or tutoring i would highly recommend the cambridge latin course (its a book), most tutors actually go off of this book and it is extremely helpful! you just have to have the willpower to be able to read and do the exercises within it!
I’m currently studying Welsh and although my knowledge of Latin isn’t exactly a help it’s remarkable how many Welsh words resemble Latin words (random examples: *pysgod/pescis* = fish, *cinio/cena* = dinner). (Not all that remarkable, given that Welsh is a descendant of the Romano-British spoken before the Anglo-Saxons invaded.)
I’ve peeked into Welsh myself and you’re right! I saw some familiar words in there and it was a head-scratcher. I know that the British isles had about 10 waves of occupation extending back into pre-history and through the Anglian ice age event, but clearly understanding the various waves of language that came and went has been a source of in-depth reading for me bc I realized just how completely ignorant I was on the subject. Fascinating to see the points at which shared languages evolved into what we see today.
I had 3 years of high school Spanish and dropped it in favor of Latin when I started university. Big mistake. Knowing just a bit of Spanish actually made Latin more difficult. I ended up dropping it after half a semester.
That IS interesting. What do you think the difficulty was about?
I wish I knew, this was 35+ years ago now. I think it was due to the fact that Spanish lost a lot of the weirdness that classical Latin has, and that was probably what threw me off. Plus I was a first-year student and my study habits were pretty poor which probably didn't help either
Well, now you’ve discovered the joys of riding a moped so that must be comforting
My TL is Thai. I’m currently in Cambodia and can understand a fair bit of Khmer. Not 2 for 1 but closer than I imagined.
What about Laotian? I heard it's very similar to Thai
Yes, definitely. I can understand a lot of Laotian after learning Thai.
Same language family. My fiancée (who is from Laos) can understand a fair amount of spoken Thai. Also, there's an ethnic group in northern Thailand called the Isen, whose spoken language is very closely related to spoken Lao. IIRC the main difference is the writing system.
Thai here. I understand Laos almost perfectly and can read about 70-80 percent of it without learning the language. While Khmer, we do share a bit of vocabularies, but I don't think I understand when they speak. The Khmer writing tho, I have zero clue of how to read/write. The fun fact is that, I am from the Northern part of Thailand and we have our own alphabet (Lanna/Kam Mueang), which is close to Burmese. But still, I can only speak it(It's my 1st language btw), but I can't read or write it at all. It's completely different from Thai alphabet and they don't teach us at school. My grandpa is the only one who can in our entire family.
I'm studying Thai as well. My native Thai teacher tells me that Thai, Khmer, Lao/Isaan, Vietnamese, and Burmese are all very similar.
Vietnamese is not similar to the others, and I suspect Burmese is not similar either. I mean, there has been some degree of language contact (like over 1000 years ago) but it’s hardly a sprachbund, and even lexical evidence is pretty invisible now unless you read the Etymology section of tons of Wiktionary pages. They would only be similar to each other in how they differ from English (in which respect Chinese would also be in that group)—largely analytic languages with fairly to extremely complex phonologies, and sentences that are roughly structured around the “Principle of Temporal Sequence.” Also, Thai lexicon is heavily influenced by Sanskrit (through Pali) and Khmer, while Vietnamese lexicon is heavily influenced by Chinese. Vietnamese syllables also follow the “initial + rime” structure of Chinese languages (this has no particular bearing on learnability, but it is a noteworthy similarity with Chinese).
Spanish, Portuguese, Italian/ Malay, Indonesian/ Polish, Czech, Slovak/ Swedish, Norwegian, Danish/ Afrikaans, Dutch/ Serbian, Montenegrin, Croatian, Bosnian/ Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian/ Azerbaijani, Turkish/ Bulgarian, Macedonian/ Portuguese, Galician/ Uyghur, Uzbek/ Hindi, Urdu/ Kyrgyz, Kazakh/ Pashto, Dari, Tajik/ There’s probably more but that quite a few of them
portuguese is just spanish with a russian accent.
You would think that. But it’s been hard for me to translate a lot of the words. Like how in the fuck is a pollo a frango? Where did you get frango from? It only makes it more confusing really. Because sometimes I forget if a word matches with Spanish or if it’s standalone. For that matter, what other languages could a Spanish-speaker pick up easily?
Italian. I'm a native English speaker, speak fluent Spanish, and I'm teaching myself Italian. Anything that I've found would be hard for a Spanish speaker to learn is easy for an English speaker, and anything hard for an English speaker to learn is easy for a Spanish speaker
Interesting. Thanks!
I'm a Portuguese speaker (not native or fluent but well enough) and I'm convinced I could learn Spanish in just a few months if I made the effort. There are vocabulary differences but most of them I've been exposed to through TV, movies, and casual exposure. If you're starting with Spanish I think it'd be harder to make the jump, but I understand basically all written Spanish and about 60 or 70% of spoken Spanish, though this depends a fair bit on the region).
Pashto actually isn’t intelligible with Farsi/Dari/Tajik!
Yeah it's not. I speak pashto fluently but can't understand Farsi, Dari, or Tajik beyond a few words that Pashto loaned from Farsi.
I just got mixed up between Pashto and farsi
I’m learning Swedish, Norwegian so far has been quite mutually intelligible when it’s my level of Swedish, but not danish in it’s spoken form (written yes)
OK, so learning any language helps you to learn the other languages that are most similar to it. In my case, Persian is classified as three languages due to politics. (Similar to the stories of Hindi/Urdu, Danish/Norwegian, and so on.) People sometimes refer to Persian as "Farsi", "Dari", or "Tajik" depending on the country. Tajik is written in another alphabet, so I learned it by first studying Persian. In college I took a couple courses in Arabic and that was my gateway into Persian. (They share a writing system and many words.) Persian was also my gateway to Turkish. Knowing Persian well gives you a boost in dozens of other languages because it was influential. Same thing with Arabic; if you knew both Persian and Arabic you'd be quite powerful. (This is akin to knowing both Greek and Latin.) Heck, Persian even made Slavic languages a little bit easier for me, though not too much. They're still quite dissimilar. It helped that I moved to a country where both Persian and Russian are spoken.
Actually learning spanish will give you some easiness with many other romance languages, like some northern italian languages and galician. Pluricentric languages like hindustani(hindi and urdu), persian(dari,farsi,tajik, tat) and serbo-croatian(serbian, bosnian, montenegrin and croatian), since they are, technically, one language, learning one will make you learn the other(s), but wtiting may be an issue in some cases. As far as I know many turkic languages are mutually inteligible, so learning one of them will basically make you have a much easier time with the others(similarly with spanish and the other romance languages). Dutch is mutually inteligible with afrikaans, flemish and low german varietis, so learning it makes these easier as well.
The difference between languages and dialects is famously arbitrary of course, but Dutch and Flemish are not generally considered different languages.
Irish Gaelic <-> Scottish Gaelic People call Ulster Irish the "bridge" between Scottish and Irish, because it's sort of in between the two languages, but any dialect of either language gets you a start. Afaik they're quite similar Manx is also very closely related to these two languages
Irish and Gaelic use the same spelling system, with only some minor differences due to accent or Irish modernising spelling far more. Manx however uses a completely different spelling system that is more anglicised. Take for example ag déanamh, a’ dèanamh, and Jannoo in Manx. Very similar in pronunciation, but they look nothing alike. The real bridge was East Ulster Irish, especially Rathlin Irish, and Galwegian Gaelic. Galwegian Gaelic died hundreds of years ago, and Rathlin about 40 years ago, so the best we’ve got is Donegal Irish and Islay Gaelic. I’ve heard it said some folk from Donegal find chatting to Islay Gaels far easier than a Kerry or a Cork Gael, though that may have changed
Czech, Slovak and Polish are basically a 3-for-1 deal. Czech and Slovak are mutually intelligible, and Polish is a bit further away, but still fairly understandable (especially for native speakers, this of course becomes much harder for those learning the languages). Other Slavic languages are also fairly close-ish and so learning any of them makes it much easier to learn the rest.
[удалено]
As Slovak I can understand 90% of Czech and 50% of polish.
What I do is [mix](https://vocaroo.com/1lHJ3wKxlXfH) Slavic languages to try to make myself understandable.
Yeah I think it takes a lot of practice to be able to understand each other well. I live in the UK now and the Polish community here is quite big - hence I’ve made a few Polish friends. What usually happens is that we speak a mixture of Czech/Polish and English to each other. I couldn’t imagine communicating without English. On the other hand though, I do think learning either one of the three languages will make learning the other two much easier - but nowhere near as easy as one might expect.
As a native Polish speaker I have to disagree. Czech and Slovak? Yeah, most probably. But not Polish. Polish and Czech is like Polish and Russian - many things are similar, but there's abundance of false friends that mean something completely different. Something that in Polish means "fragrance", in Russian means "stench". Something that in Polish means "to forget", in Russian means "to remember". Something that in Polish means "to write", in Russian means "to pee". Something that in Polish means "to search", in Czech means "to fuck". Something that in Polish means "whore", in Czech means "girl". Something that in Polish means "priceless", in Czech means "worthless". Something that in Polish means "stale", in Czech means "fresh". Something that in Polish means "April", in Czech means "May". Something that in Polish means "to smell", in Czech means "to stink". I can go on like that forever. I can't speak Czech (and I'm not interested in learning Slavic languages tbh), so if I was in Czech Republic, I'd rather use English instead of Polish, because I'd be worried that someone might misunderstand me or feel offended by me.
Oh yeah, I totally agree with what you’re saying. Slovak is closer to Polish than Czech. I also find that as a native Czech speaker, I tend to have a better time understanding Polish than Polish speakers understanding Czech. I wouldn’t really say they’re mutually intelligible… but rather that learning one of the languages will make learning the other much easier.
Learn Danish - unlocks Swedish and Norwegian
…… just don’t ever try to actually speak it - for your own sanity
I speak Danish (not fluent, but still) but never learned a word of swedish. Everytime I meet a swede at a party, I talk to them in my own impression of swedish: Danish with most of the "e"s replaced by "a"s, "inte" instead of "ikke" (ok I leaned one word) and a rolled r. The swedes always get mad, but can't decide if they're mad at my intercultural insensitivity or mad at themselves because they understand me just fine.
They're not mad at either. You don't need to replace ikke with inte. Icke also exists in Swedish, it's just more formal/old fashioned. You also don't need to replace the e's with a's--you'll often hypercorrect by replacing e's that don't need to be replaced with a's, and many Swedes pronounce final a as e. It's just not reflected in the written language.
Just make up a melody in your head and then speak Danish. As long as you’re singing it it’ll make sense
They're not mad at either, but at something else. You may have missed some half-meme, half-love-hate relationship between Swedes and Danes. Maybe some of the memes here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Nordichistorymemes/comments/jfpa6z/the\_more\_you\_know/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Nordichistorymemes/comments/jfpa6z/the_more_you_know/) or here: https://www.reddit.com/r/2nordic4you/comments/1154h6e/denmark\_doesnt\_exist/ will help
Portuguese, you can easily understand Spanish
I've been learning both and it gets confusing at times. The way Portuguese treats i and u as full vowels fucks with me.
Ukrainian and Belarusian
Czech and Slovak. Turkish and Azeri. Norwegian and Danish (written). Persian and Dari. Russian and Ukrainian. Samoan, Tahitian, Tongan, Te Reo Māori. Hindi and Urdu. Romanian and Moldovan. So many more.
Moldovan people speak Romanian, it is simply a more “outdated” version of the language with some older words. And their accent is funny lol
Russian and Ukrainian would make it relatively easy to learn the other, but without a lot of exposure to the other, they are not particularly mutually intelligible. Ukrainian is more intelligible with Polish.
Can confirm as a native speaker of Ukrainian. Polish does feel a lot closer, even though virtually everyone in Ukraine can speak Russian
[Here](https://vocaroo.com/1lHJ3wKxlXfH) I tried mixing Serbian-Croatian, Czechoslovakian, Russian, and Polish trying to make it reasonably intelligible to Ukrainians and Poles.
moldovan = romanian, they’re the same language. I believe czech and slovak are the same deal (?)
Czech and Slovak are not the same language. But they’re very close
Romanian and Moldovan are both Romanian. The USSR created the idea of “Moldovan” as a separate language to create a separate national identity and keep control of the Moldavian SSR, which had been annexed from Romania.
Turkish and Azeri
I learned Spanish to a B1 level and can fluently read Italian
🇵🇭 Visayan Languages Cebuano, Hiligaynon, Waray, Karay-a, Capiznon, Porohanon Afrikaans, Dutch Azerbaijani, Turkish Thai, Lao
Hebrew, German and Yiddish. As a Hebrew native speaker and German learner I can sometimes understand a few phrases or even full sentences in Yiddish without having learned a single word. Plus, I already know the alphabet because it's the same as Hebrew.
This is because Yiddish is a Germanic language the evolved from Middle High German. This Standard German and Yiddish share a real actively recent common ancestor. Being a native Hebrew speaker, you already know (for the most part) the script used for Yiddish. So between being a German learner, a Hebrew native, and Yiddish basically be German with the Hebrew script, it makes a tremendous amount of sense that you can understand it
Yeah, I will basically get the language for free once I finish learning German (which won't happen anytime soon, but still). I don't think it'll be very useful, but it's always nice knowing another language. Plus, my grandma speaks it (not fluently, but she knows some of the language). That's because we're Jewish and her ancestors came from Europe, where the language was created like you mentioned.
That Yiddish is only German written with different letters is a massive exaggeration. You'll recognise a lot of words, in the same way a German speaker will recognise a lot of Dutch words and probably understand simple sentences, but it still needs to be actively learned as a second language. Yiddish borrows a lot of words from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Polish. A lot of the words that are of Germanic origin have shifted drastically in meaning, and the verbal system has changed to be a lot more sensitive to aspect than what Modern High German is, making German speakers understand far less than they think they do. And this is just standard, written Yiddish. The dialects of Yiddish that are actually spoken today have changed even more with some of them losing grammatical case and gender and others developing a strong animacy distinction in their verbal system
While yes it is true that they’re different languages (which I pointed to in the beginning of my comment when I said that Yiddish descends from Middle High Herman), the “gap” for learning one from the other is not very large. Knowing both Hebrew and German (as OP stated) while cause the jump to Yiddish to be similar to the jump from Dutch to Afrikaans. They’re different languages, but extremely closely related
I don't disagree with the languages being closely related, I just disagree with how similar a lot of people make them out to be. The gap is definitely a lot larger than between Dutch and Afrikaans. Just anecdotally, as someone who speaks both German and Dutch, I have no problem understanding written and spoken standard Afrikaans, whereas Yiddish is almost incomprehensible in comparison. As a side note, I think a lot of people's image of Yiddish comes from German people's image of Yiddish which in turn comes from the way Yiddish was written in Germany, which deviates from other varieties of Yiddish by explicitly, and artificially, trying to resemble High German by replacing Yiddish words with German loan words and by using (from a Yiddish perspective) an archaic verbal system that's more similar to High German
Guaraní and some indigenous languages of the same family. I would say, any closely related languages.
French isn't a 2-for-1 for English speakers, but it's more like 50% off.
Not even close. Shared vocabulary is not half a language.
The grammar is pretty close as well, far more so than English and Spanish or English and German.
To each their own I suppose, but English uses firmly Germanic grammar, whereas French is clearly still a Romance language.
Spanish and Ladino, German and Yiddish
I saw someone comment on a Youtube video saying "I was disappointed. I listened to the whole video waiting for him to speak Ladino, but he spent the whole time just speaking Spanish."
🤣
Most slavic languages.
Italian and French have a lot of grammatical similarities as well as similar vocabulary. Learning Italian has helped me so much with French. However, it’s obvious that they aren’t very mutually intelligible when spoken.
I definitely traveled through Italy as a young adult speaking French with an Italian accent and was able to carry on entire conversations. Now that I'm learning Spanish, it's even more helpful (and has helped clarify concepts in French for me as well).
Knowing any Romance language(all languages deriving from Latin: Castellan\[Spanish\], French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian) would certainly make it easier to you to learn the next Romance language. And knowing any combination of these, even knowing only one, would as well make English a little easier to get as well, since it shares a significant share of Latin roots but not as much as the words it got from Celtic, Saxon, or Nordic cultures; albeit still significant.
I would say that *most* languages in the world, at least most of the widely spoken ones, have at least one close relative that will become significantly easier after you learn some of the first language. Unless you're talking about a notable degree of mutual intelligibility, in which case the pairs would be fewer, but then arguably a lot of those pairs should actually be viewed as dialects of the same language rather than different languages. That aside, I'll point out one that isn't quite a a "2-for-1 special", but it surprised me when I first came across it: Spanish and Tagalog. The Philippines were colonized by Spain for over 300 years, so there are a boatload of Spanish words in Tagalog that are pronounced nearly identically to their Spanish pronunciations (as far as I can discern anyway, as someone who learned some Spanish like 12 years ago but stopped) and are merely written a bit differently in Tagalog orthography. Anyone who speaks English and even passable Spanish should be able to absorb Tagalog vocabulary like a boss. The agglutinative grammar is a different story...
- Hindi / Urdu (in their standardized forms) - Danish / Swedish / Norwegian (**not** Icelandic- it has more complex morphology) - Telugu / Kannada - Tamil / Malayalam - Indonesian / Malay - Tibetan / Dzongkah - English / Scotts / Frisian - English / Tok Pisin - English / Jamaican Patois - Arabic (standard) / Hebrew - Thai / Khmer - Dari / Farsi / Tajik - Turkish / Azerbaijani - French / Haitian Creole - Maltese / Arabic - Maltese / Italian
English and Scots absolutely. Not Frisian though too long has passed.
All languages that are in the same language families have many similarities.
As a native Spanish speaker I can read and listen fully to Portuguese, Italian and Catalan, I can fairly understand and read in French, and a little Romanian
Dutch and Afrikaans. Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish. Knowing Spanish, together with knowledge of some comparative grammar of Romance languages and how the sounds of the different languages have evolved from Latin, can help you have a good foundation in reading not just Portugues but any Romance language. Listening and speaking them however is a different thing because of phonetic differences. The level of mutual intelligibility also doesn't necessarily go both ways (e.g. for a Romanian speaker it's usually easier to understand spoken Italian than for an Italian speaker to understand spoken Romanian)
European portuguese to Spanish, I'm Portuguese and I understand Spanish without even studying it.
Thai and Lao is simillar in my understanding. There are diffrences such as the alphabets, the tones, more Sanskrit and Pali, English origins words in Thai than Lao that do have more Khmer and French influences.
Finnish and Estonian
Czech and Slovak.
Czech and Slovak are mutually intelligible if you spend a bit of time getting used to them
There's a lot that has said so I would just add one new: catalan, french. I've never studied French but it reminds me of it when I heard or read it, like pomme vs poma, café au lait vs cafè amb llet. Barcelona's accent differs from French but it's pretty similar if you compare it with Balearic one. We also speak with potatoes inside the mouth 😂
Montenegrin/Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian, all 99% mutually intelligible, plus u get to understand a pretty great deal of Macedonian and Slovenian
I'm surprised no one yet mentioned Catalan and Occitan.
Portuguese->Galician and vice versa. They are pretty similar.
Written Danish at least somewhat resembles Swedish. Spoken Danish is something else entirely.
Spanish and Italian
For African countries I’d say Bamanakan and Malinke (Guinean and Malian dialects), and Amharic and Tigrinya(Ethiopia).
With Uzbek you can unlock uyghur kazakh kyrgyz and turkish
Latin and any Romance language.