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.

  • Canadian_Cabinet @lemmy.ca
    0·
    2 years ago

    I’d agree with the any of the Romance languages. As a native Spanish speaker I constantly begin to read Portugese before realizing that I can’t really read this.

  • Kalash@feddit.ch
    0·
    2 years ago

    A whole bunch of slavik languages are very similar. I had an ex from Slovakia and she could reasonably communicate in Polish and Czech.

    • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.worksOP
      0·
      2 years ago

      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 neologism 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.

      • Kalash@feddit.ch
        0·
        2 years ago

        Yup, there seem to be several groups of slavik languages. From the Czech language wiki:

        Czech […] is a West Slavic language of the Czech–Slovak group, written in Latin script. […] Czech is closely related to Slovak, to the point of high mutual intelligibility, as well as to Polish to a lesser degree

        Also there is the Germanic languages. The youtube channel “RobWords” as a lot of interessting videos.

        Two of them he talks about certain letter replacements that let’s you somewhat read German or French by just replacing certain letters that turns them into English words.

  • gandalf_der_12te@feddit.de
    0·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • guyrocket@kbin.social
    0·
    2 years ago

    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.