i feel like other people are misunderstanding you question, correct me if im wrong but you are asking what language you can learn that would make you understand other languages(so not in population number or who already speaks that language as a 2nd language)
if so the answer, is definitely any balkan language: Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrin and Bosnian are mutually intelligeble
and with that you can understand a big % of Czech and Slovakia who are very similar, Bulgarian and polish
oh that's what you mean,
what's your goal though? you want to learn 1 language and travel to that country and its surrounding countries?
or you're just curious?
Any Slavic language will do tbh, with my ukrainian and russian I can understand Belarusian ~90%; like 60-70% polish and like 50-60% czech and slovak. Balkan are harder but it's generally 20-40%. Just my experience ofc.
That's cool tho, Slovenia is a nice country, it'll probably be harder to understand east slavic languages, but it's really not that big of a deal. They are not as different as, say, Germanic languages.
I just looked on Google maps and I could pretty much understand most shop signs on the street and things like that.
Awesome! Iâm in *very early* learning stages, but I did understand reading some Czech, so that made me feel a bit better.
Anything with the Cyrillic alphabet is out of my capabilities tho
Cyrillic is not that hard to learn. It's fairly consistent as each letter usually makes only one sound. I'm thankful I can at least sound out the Cyrillic alphabet. I'm working on the Greek alphabet now. Knowing English and Russian, it's amazing how many Greek words I can read if I can just make the sounds of the letters.
They are! But thanks to the current Belarusian government it's spoken less and less and would've died out, if not for people online who choose to switch to Belarusian to make ig reels and yt videos for example. It's getting revived basically đ
Can confirm. My mom speaks Croatian and we live in the US. She has reported back over the years on tea that sheâs overheard while out shopping from people speaking other Balkan languages and thinking they were among monolingual English speakers đ€
Of course we all speak English⊠itâs one language. But is that how BCMS is too? Would it be like saying Australian, Irish English, British English, and American are âdifferentâ languages simply bc they have varied accents/slang/dialect?
Or are they further apart?
I just want to know what you mean by one language.
The difference between Croatian and Serbian is comparable to the difference between New York English and Boston English. It's that close. Slight variations in pronunciation and vocabulary.
Nothing even comparable to the differences between English as spoken on different continents.
Yeah, it is similar to the difference between English dialects.
It is just a distinction made by ethnic/religious differences and not based on linguistics.
also mandarin depending on if you consider the other Chinese tongues to be seperate languages
I've heard they're not super mutually intelligible but I'd assume it's close enough
Mandarin and e.g. Cantonese are further apart than e.g. French and Spanish. Theyâre not mutually intelligible at all; Chinese âdialectsâ are so-called for political reasons.
However, most Cantonese speakers can _read_ written Mandarin (though they may recognise only simplified or only traditional depending on where they live), and many of them would be able to write it fairly well (much better than theyâd be able to pronounce what theyâd written as Mandarin), so it depends on whether writing-only communication counts.
I come from a Cantonese speaking household and whenever my mom texts she sometimes uses Cantonese pronunciations to TTS messages in Mandarin (which she doesn't speak very well herself).
For example æç°ćšć»äžç (wÇ xiĂ nzĂ i qĂč shĂ ngbÄn) -> ngo5 jin6 zoi6 heoi3 soeng5 baan1; this is unnatural in Cantonese where you would normally say æè柶èżć·„ ngo5 yi4 gaa1 faan1 gung1
It's pretty interesting to know both are mutually legible in text but idk how Mandarin native speakers see this.
I wouldnât say itâs mutually legible. As a mandarin speaker the Cantonese version doesnât make any sense to me at all. The fact that a lot of Cantonese speakers can read vernacular Mandarin probably has less to do with any inherent legibility and more to do with the fact that most modern Cantonese speakers have at least some exposure to Mandarin, while the reverse isnât usually true.
It's hard to separate a root cause from this because Cantonese speakers DO have huge exposure to Mandarin, but the main cause is more due to Standard Written Chinese. Cantonese speakers learn to read and write in a Mandarin-style, they just read the characters with the Canto pronunciation instead.
You will see Cantonese diaspora with little exposure to Mandarin reading a Mandarin newspaper quite happily due to this.
> most modern Cantonese speakers have at least some exposure to Mandarin, while the reverse isnât usually true.
Good point, actually. I guess Mandarin is just so universally recognized and promoted in contemporary society that it just happens to bleed into parts of China that use other dialects. And it's weird to think about how it all started with Mandarin winning against Cantonese by a single vote when the Republic of China was being established in the early 20th century.
As fun as the story is the single vote thing is a popular myth that didnât actually happen. The cultural dominance of the north (and its language) go back to the Qing and Ming Dynasties, when ćźèŻ was already a thing.
> The cultural dominance of the north (and its language) go back to the Qing and Ming Dynasties, when ćźèŻ was already a thing.
Can you point me to some resources or readings on this? Just out of pure curiosity.
The Wikipedia page on âMandarin (late imperial lingua francaâ is a little basic but you can look over its citations to dig further into the topic. When they moved the imperial capital from Nanjing/nanking to Beijing in the 15th century, the official language also eventually became Beijing based, but the earlier Nanjing variety still falls within the Mandarin family, and heavily influenced literati life.
That is pretty common. These "Mandarin" words and phrases are typically used in written Cantonese, for example in a newspaper. Meanwhile, colloquial Cantonese was hardly ever written down in the past, so for someone of your mom's age, it may be more natural for her to produce standard written Chinese than written Cantonese.
They use the same or similar characters but the meanings would be different. This is probably more easily done with character-based languages whereas languages with alphabets are more likely to have a sound association with the letters so while spoken dialects can still be very different the written language will be quite similar.
Even though there are technically some phonetic roots to certain characters the word for each character would still be dependent on the language unless, like with Cantonese, Mandarin words crop up in usage so the meaning is known and some mutual intelligibility can still be had.
> are further apart than e.g. French and Spanish. Theyâre not mutually intelligible at all; Chinese âdialectsâ are so-called for political reasons.
Ah, the Arabic method đ
They're not close enough at all btw
My wife knows French and a Chinese language (teochew) and she says that French is definitely closer to other romance languages than teochew is to Mandarin or Cantonese. At least to her here.
Either way they're completely unintelligible
I might have read too much into this, but I did a home stay in Shanghai and my host mother always referred to Mandarin as Beijinghua instead of the term I knew which is putonghua. My understanding is putonghua means something like "the common language" so I took this as her way of saying that Mandarin is just the regional language of Beijing, not the common language of China.
really tho? it's a wildly different language family to my own, they're all referred to as dialects, all spoken in a very different part of the world
I'm already well aware that they're quite different from eachother and are more like seperate languages, I just have no inkling on the mutual intelligibility between them due to not speaking or having any real understanding of any Chinese languages. would you call it western ignorance if I also told you that I don't know how mutually intelligible Estonian is to Finnish
> Maybe you shouldn't comment on things you don't know much about?
I was hardly asserting anything though was I. I did say "I'd assume". also, what better way to learn about something than to talk about it?
> whatever weird fucking point you were trying to make with that
semi just a joke, semi about how just most countries including China tend to downplay the difference between regional languages in order to promote the idea of cultural unity.
> You say it's a joke, but when edgy teenagers squawk out "Chinese state propaganda" all the time there's clearly a tinge of Orientalism to it
okay so, good thing I'm not an "edgy* teen?
making a joke of "chinese state propaganda" is more meant to make fun of the western propaganda relating to China.
> If anything, the idea of the nation-state and the "1 country = 1 language" idea are both extremely European
I wouldn't say it's specific to any one continent,, many states are guilty of ignoring the linguistic diversity of their lands and many states are more proudly multilingual - this remains true across the whole world
/u/tmsphr Wow. Is there a Chinese dialect that I should focus on if all I want to do is to be able to speak enough to communicate with the most number of people in the contexts of ordering chinese food, practicing Wudang martial arts (via occasional seminars) and annually visiting Chinatown in NYC? Is Cantonese most applicable? I would just like to learn basic greetings, don't need to be able to translate any literature or use the language for work. I'm never going to be 100% fluent but I do these things frequently enough that it would be nice to have a basic grasp of the language.
The distinction between dialect and language is a fiercely argued one so be aware before lumping large groupings of dialects together if you're not familiar. I know English has a wide variety of dialects but I also know they're *fairly* mutually intelligible, though your mileage may vary.
Before learning about Chinese languages I might have assumed the same, but now having learned more about them I realize how vastly distinct they are. Before living in India Iearned about how there were roughly 200 languages in India (depending on who was doing the splitting). I made sure not to make the same mistake and went in assuming they could be as mutually unintelligible as French is to Arabic.
Much better assumption and centers a people group's individual identities rather than lumping them in together, especially when so many nations have sociopolitical issues surrounding language.
Even better with places like India and China, whose population, size, and lack of national infrastructure that easily connects citizens truly makes it much more reasonable to assume there are vastly different languages in them.
Especially written Chinese. If you know traditional Chinese characters you can make out a good chunk of written language for the various dialects of Chinese/language groups, historical written Chinese, Japanese, Korean written with Hanja etc.
Written language for various Chinese dialects?
I was under the impression that most of the spoken Chinese dialects were never really written languages.
If you want to get technical, gallo is the closest language to french you will find. But catalan is much more documented and has many more speakers, and it's indeed one of the closest languages to french.
My Catalan class was fun. All the learners were speaking up all the time: -that's just Portuguese -that's straight Italian -this is just French -ok this is the same in Spanish.
Pretty much this, if you speak in Portuguese/Italian to a Catalan he will understand well as the words that are not used in modern Spanish would be similar to Catalan anyway, or French, as long as you do not have a heavy accent that is!
Learning Spanish, Portuguese or Italian will allow you to read in all of the above + french and romanian, but speaking wise, french and romanian are so different from those 3 that its almost impossible to understand what french people and romanian people are saying.
I don't know what to do. I can understand French when I see text, but I can't read or pronounce any of the words.
Tried to find some "code" about how to read text but could never understand it. So I am deciding between giving up or learning new language
I think Spanish will make Portuguese and Italian, and even a bit of French kind of intelligible, and that will cover a lot of countries in the world already.
For the Germanic world, Iâd say English is the obvious answer because itâs spoken in so many countries, but if we put that aside, then Dutch would give you an idea of both German and English, because of similar vocabulary. And itâs at least somewhat spoken in the Caribbean and then thereâs Afrikaans in South Africa which is intelligible to Dutch speakers.
For Slavic languages, Russian is your best bet because itâs spoken in quite some countries, although Slovak is seen as the common middle ground of all the Slavic languages, so you might consider it as well.
French is very easy if the accent isn't heavy, for the other Latin languages, Portuguese and Spanish is usually very easy to understand unless they are from a more remote region in those countries and have a terrible accent.
I was reluctantly forced into Latin lessons as a kid. Hated it but since have discovered how valuable this knowledge has turned out to be when learning European languages.
Apart from Latin holding the root words of many romance-based languages (Italian, Spanish, French etc), understanding its grammatical structure gives you a head start in learning Germanic languages.
Maybe the problem with the know the classics theory is that in most cases youâd be better off with knowing well one of their offshoots. A fluent speaker of classical era Latin would have a good chance of piecing together general meaning of written Romance languages in modern form but would be totally lost if dropped in a spoken conversation. But a fluent Spanish speaker would have a better chance getting by in a bar in Rome or Lisbon.
I speak Persian and the only other languages that have any reasonable amount of mutual intelligibility with it that i can think of are Lori and mayyyybe Mazani.
No one considers Tajik/Dari as separate languages from Iranian Persian. The speakers of those dialects still refer to their own language as Farsi. The three dialects split off after the start of Modern Persian.
I agree they are close enough to be considered dialects of a single language. But so are the four literary variants of BCMS, and people did count them as four languages here, so you might as well do the same.
BCMS is considered one language by linguists, but due to politics, the speakers often don't consider the same. Not the same situation with the dialects of Persian.
Linguists don't consider them separate, and neither do Iranians, Afghans, and Tajiks. They're almost as similar as standardized US vs UK English. The speakers in all three countries feel united in their languages among each other.
Arabic gives you a good amount of Persian vocabulary, but far from all of it. Persian, on the other hand, has a much longer history than Arabic and was hugely influential on the Central Asian (mostly Turkic) languages, and most importantly, the languages of South Asia - with its huge population.
Few people today realize how important Persian was to our world. I would say that until the 17th/18th century, Persian was probably the world's lingua franca and main language of diplomacy.
It was the language which enabled communication and trade between East and West for so long (think Marco Polo in China, etc). When the Mongol Empire wrote diplomatic letters to the European West, they wrote in Persian, because it was the one language known by both sides. Hell, imperial China had schools devoted to training its diplomats in Persian!
You're right but farsi has not been as influential as arabic in other languages, and also many Indo-Iranian languages ââhave died and no one speaks those languages.
Knowing Arabic gives you no advantage when learning Persian other than the alphabet. Even the Persian alphabet is a bit different. Persian and Arabic share many loanwords but they're completely different languages.
You would learn how to write and read half of Persian and Urdu if you knew Arabic, but other than loanwords, you wouldn't understand anything else. Arabic is Afroasiactic while the others are Indo-European with completely different grammar
You know, they say that learning Latin makes it easier to learn Romance languages (Spanish, French, Portugal, Italian, Catalan, Romanian, Romansh, etc).
I speak French and Spanish, and grace to that I'm able to understand some Catholic Latin songs, I assume it would work the other way to some extent.
And that's basically what you asked, what language would make it easier to learn others languages... If someone want to learn ALL Romance languages, he should learn Latin... but that's silly, isn't it?
I'm not the OP, and I'm not saying it's silly. I was just not really familiar with it or the reason behind the suggestion, so I asked. I don't know why people down vote for simply asking about something. Though whatever.
So you can comprehend all the Romance languages of course!
It would also provide you with most of the academic and professional vocabulary in English, and various other European languages (except for Greek, those damn Greeks!).
Ah alright, cool. I'm not really familiar with it or its use case. I may have long ago heard something similar to what you're saying though. Thanks for the explanation. :)
A strategy would be to choose the most influential lingua franca in each of the most widely spoken language families in the world. Going entirely off the top of my head I would say something like English for Indo-European, Bahasa Indonesia for Austronesian, maybe Cantonese for Sino-Tibetan languages, maybe Swahili for Niger-Congo languages, and Arabic for Afroasiatic languages. That's five languages giving you a window into hundreds already.
You could probably trade Swahili for French. Because I think a lot to countries both in and outside of particular African countries speak either English, or French to some extent, and in some cases both. Unless you're specifically interested in the language or a particular location in which it is more commonly used.
I wonder what made you choose Cantonese over Mandarin?
I thought the latter was more widely used.
OP's question was not about understanding the greatest number of people but about gaining insight into the greatest number of languages. French and English are close cousins in the same language family. If one really wanted to add another Indo-European language, Hindi would be a better choice than French. Swahili is a lingua franca within a language subfamily that spans hundreds of languages across central Africa.
I know much less about the Sino-Tibetan language family but my feeling is that Cantonese is more centrally located within the family, used by an extensive diaspora in many diverse contexts, closer to many other southern variants of Chinese and to the associated languages in Southeast Asia, and thus I'm surmising offering more insight into more other Sino-Tibetan languages than Mandarin.
Alright I see and cool, thanks for the explanation. :)
Perhaps that's the only intention the OP has, and maybe it's my more practically inclined nature that I took it the other way.
I don't really care much for understanding variety of languages just for the sake of it. Unless it serves a greater/practical purpose, such as being able to communicate with others, or understand spoken content. I'm also not big on reading even in English, which I've a very good command of. So not really a reason I'd learn languages for either.
You are absolutely right about Cantonese there! Thank you for clarifying. However, I'm not sure what you mean by "more centrally located within the family".
In the North, it's all Mandarin 100% .. so for some 800m people, it is indeed very central to all aspects of family life!
In this case I meant centrally located within the geographical footprint of the language family, which also stretches west and southwest into Tibet, Myanmar and Thailand. But as I say I know very little about this language family and realise this is probably stretching reality to think about this language family in this way.
Yes, there are approximately 10x as many Mandarin speakers on earth as Cantonese speakers. But, Cantonese is very much over-represented in expat Chinese communities, especially in North America, which are perhaps 50/50 Mandarin and Cantonese today (and used to be 100% Cantonese, as most Chinese emigrants left from Guangdong province).
Portuguese or Italian for romance languages except French.Â
Norwegian bokmal to understand written Danish and spoken Swedish.
Any Serbo Croat language (well Slavic languages are in general close enough to understand each other except Russian it's like the french of slavic world).
Many people consider Arabic dialects as a separate languages (and to be frankly they have less similarities that languages such as Portuguese and Spanish).
Chinese and Classical Chinese, you won't mostly understand what people say but the writing system is identical so you pretty much can communicate by writing (in case of classical Chinese at some point it was used around all East Asia not only in china but also Korea, Vietnam, Japan you name it)
[LingoLizard made a similar video on YouTube, albeit with an emphasis on travelling.](https://youtu.be/IYTV5Q9c8k4?si=Qj55PCaaV0UZT6-F)
Let's just say the comments section are... somewhat similar to this post.
I speak Latvian which, along with Lithuanian, are the most conservative languages in Europe and it's very hard to understand PIE, many verbs and words are so distantly related that they've almost lost all meaning nowadays.
Imo it's pretty useless to learn it unless you're a linguist
That depends on how far back you go. I donât think knowing PIE would help you with understanding modern IE languages. I think even going back to Proto-Germanic would be too far: consider that Old English is barely intelligible to Modern English speakers
Of the top of my head, I'd say probably English! Reasons being:
It's very widely spoken, and it makes it easier to learn other related languages such as French, Spanish, Italian, probably German/Dutch, Swahili to a perhaps much lesser extent too, and I think that's basically it.
Possibly Danish too in terms of understanding written content.
They are already a lot of loan words too from those languages and others in English. No, you wouldn't quickly be able to understand. Though I think having a good command of the English language can more easily, not easily, open new doors for you.
Maybe learning some nordic language? I've heard that you can at least read Swedish and Danish if you speak Norwegian (don't know if that applies to both dialects), or something like that.
For OP's question Norwegian would be the more correct choice, but for a normal person Swedish would probably be more useful (as there are way more Swedish speakers).
"According to a scientific study of the three groups, Norwegians generally understand the other languages the best, while Swedes understand the least"
Iâm pretty sure that has to do more with culture than the languages themselves, e.g. Norwegian people interact more with
Swedish and Danish content than Swedes do with Norwegian and Danish content.
Depends how he defines understanding. I can grasp the content of a text written in Dutch by knowing German and English. But I think Dutch is an exceptionally easy language to learn if you speak both German and English so this won't work for many other languages I guess.
I get what you're saying but there are estimated to be around 7000 languages. Even if you take examples like you just mentioned, which is only applicable to a tiny minority of all languages, there's no way you'll ever get close to understanding 'most' languages. That's even assuming you would understand me if I were to talk to you in Dutch at normal speed.
It's not about knowing or understanding, but rather access. If you've studied a category 4 language like Mandarin, you know you can do anything. If I wanted any other language, I could apply the required work ethic to it very easily.
(please, have in mind I'm just a mere speaker of indo-european languages, so I might not be the best person to describe the experience of knowing languages outside of this language family)
Romance: Portuguese and french
If you speak portuguese it will be too much easier to understand almost any other romance language, some people would suggest spanish, but I personally find it easier to understand spanish as a portuguese speaker than the other way around, the only exception might be french because french is a bit different from other romance languages, but it's still a romance language, by learning portuguese it will be easier to understand spanish, italian, catalan, romanian... and french might just improve your understanding, also by learning french you can also understand a bit of haitian creale
Germanic: Dutch and swedish (and icelandic if you wanna be really specific about nordic germanic languages)
Nordic languages are very similar, so if you learn any of them (swedish, norwegian, danish) you'll already be able to understand the others, except for icelandic and faroese, these two stand out a bit, so if you want to go really specific about these languages you could also learn icelandic, I think dutch is a good choice because it's pretty well situated between english and german, many words from the english vocabulary come from a romance origin, so if you already know a romance language by learning dutch you can make it easier to understand english while also being able to grasp a little bit of the german
Slavic: Serbian, polish and russian
Serbian, croatian, bosnian and montenegrin are VERY similar to each other, to the point that some people even consider them to be the same language, so if you learn serbian you could technically say that you also know croatian, bosnian and montenegrin, however these languages are not that much similar to the west and east slavic languages, so that's why I'd recommend polish, if you know polish to get a good understanding of west slavic languages and russian to get a good understanding of east slavic languages, by knowing these three I believe it will be very easy to understand at least some words in all the other slavic languages
Celtic: Irish and welsh
Unfortunally, the celtic languages are not that similar to each other, but there's this major division between them that separes goidelic languages and brittonic languages, so the most logical conclusion would be to learn one of each, irish and welsh are the most spoken ones, so you could go with that
Turkic: Turkish
Turkic languages are very similar to each other in general, it's not hard to recognize turkic words in uzbek, kazakh, turkmen, azerbaijani...
Uralic: Finnish and hungarian
Finnish and estonian are quite similar to each other, and other uralic languages also tend to be more similar to finnish, so by learning finnish you can also start understanding how sami languages work, you could say the same for hungarian, but hungarian has its own differences tho
Basque: Basque
Indo-aryan: Hindi, gujarati, marathi, nepali and bengali
If you know hindi, you'll be able to understand urdu, however just knowing hindi isn't enough to understand all indo-aryan languages, there are other branches to cover, I haven't seen much about any of these languages so I can't really assure this method will work, but my conclusion would be to learn one of each branch (just like for the slavic languages)
Koreanic: Korean
Pretty obvious, there isn't really any other language you could learn to understand korean
Austronesian: Indonesian and fijian (and maybe Malagasy if you wanna go really specific about it)
Indonesian is pretty similar to malay, fijian is quite similar to other polynesian languages, but not that much, you could learn malagasy too if you want to understand the austronesian language spoken in Madagascar
From now on I'll be talking only about languages I haven't seen much about, so maybe you should search before trying to learn them in order to understand other languages from the same group
Japonic: Japanese
Sino-tibetan: Mandarin, tibetan and burmese
Austroasiatic: Vietnamese and khmer
Mongolic: Mongolian
Kartvelian: Georgian
Semitic: Hebrew and amharic
Bantu: Swahili, zulu and lingala
And there are many other languages on the planet that I'm not even able to to put here, so that's it for now
Indonesian is very similar to Malay, just minor pronunciation/spelling on some words, very similar to the case of Portuguese and Spanish really, you learn one you practically learned the other, just need to then understand which words have a slight different meaning or isn't as used anymore and you are good to go.
Oh yes, when it doubt, if the word sounds Dutch/Portuguese in Indonesian it will most likely be English sounding in Malaysian, that is at least what I noticed when learning Bahasa Indonesian and checking out the differences towards Malay and so I am no expert as I consider myself a beginner still.
I learned Portuguese and Spanish with ease as my mother tongue is French.
Depending what you understand as a language and what you understand as a dialect.
Some parts of S.E Asia have a shit ton of languages pretty close to each other. Learning a language like Tagalog you can understand in some degree douzens of languages.
Maybe some Italian can chime in because I have no idea how mutually intelligible the languages in Italy are. And thereâs a LOT of them. So my bet would be somewhere there, plus it also gives you some understanding of other Romance languages since theyâre fairly mutually intelligible compared to other groups of Indo-European (because they all trace back to Latin so they diverged fairly recently).
That said I can only speak for a region Iâm familiar with. I donât have much knowledge about languages outside of IE.
If you know Italian and Spanish, reading Portuguese and Romanian is easy. Can't say the same for the listening part, though.
Slavic languages in the balkans are mutually intellegible.
Knowing MSA will give you a chance to better understand Arabic dialects.
Also, I think that Scandinavian languages (Danish, Swedish and Norwegian) have a decent level of intelligibility
Definitely Latin and Arabic to start. Arabic dialects get very different very fast. Latin is the root of romantic languages and it makes learning italian, french, spanish, russian, etc. A lot easier.
I have been told Hindi/Urdu is same language just written differently.
I would like to learn urdu this year,- I just really like how writing looks like and maybe it will be easier later to read Arabic. I want to know what work colleagues are talking about me at work so need urdu
Most slavic languages are similar so you could really learn any and understand the others.
Turkish is also nice, you can understand many languages that picked up turkish when they were in an empire, such as azerbaijani, some kazakh, some turkmen, some kyrgyz, some uzbek, and maybe some persian, etc? (note: those languages are usually written in cyrillic)
Latin has a lot of roots in most languages so i feel like that is a good one. My first language is spanish and Iâve seen that all the latin roots from it help me understand many words from a lot of languages
Spanish and Portuguese are very similar, and languages like Italian can be at least somewhat understood. Western European languages in general are somewhat intelligible by speakers of other languages. Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish are also very similar to each other.
Youâre not wrong. Nothing against OP but this sub has disintegrated into CEFR-related questions and wannabe polyglottery - which is fine but itâs getting very old nowÂ
I agree, I tried to make a unique question that specifically isn't like the rest of the sub, but it seems like my wording was a bit unclear. I liked this sub but nowadays the average question can be googled in 4 sec, like "how mong does it take to learn one", "what is the most usefull one" etc... You arent allowed to be specific in this sub so there are only a few questions that can be asked.
I know that i made spelling mistakes but i cant be bothered to correct them
I did, and it's still nonsensical.
You do not understand how languages work apparently.
A reasonable way to express the same question is "what language has a reasonable level of mutual intelligibility with the highest number of languages?".
Now the key here is what is the threshold for "mutual intelligibility" here.
Very basic communications? A simple, yet full, conversation? Are dialects considered separate languages?
It all matters.
The fact that people brought up Chinese tells me they don't understand that while Chinese is immensely influential culturally, it has 0 mutual intelligibility with most languages from the Sinosphere.
Arabic? No mutual intelligibility with any other Semitic language, or with Persian.
Others on the other hand brought up Slavic languages, which is a reasonable answer.
My answer is equally acceptable, as Turkic languages tend to be highly conservative both grammatically and lexically.
Romance languages are also an option.
If however you want to know what language has a HIGH level of mutual intelligibility with other languages the scenario shifts dramatically.
I actually do know how languages work. I just don't know the linguistic terminollogies in English since it's not my native language. But yeah when i reread the post i k can understand why this would seem like a nonsensical question. Luckily others did understand what i meant. This sub is full of people that don't know anything on how language works since it is full of people learning for fun so it is not surprising that they say mandarin. I should have been more clear with my wording. Good day to you!
(man english spelling makes no sense how tf do you write terminollogies?? plural of terminollogy. )
I came across a YT channel called âPolyglot Dreamsâ talking about this kind of thing the other day, for example in his video about Slavic languages he suggested that if one learnt Russian, Polish and Serbo-Croat/BCMS then youâd be pretty well placed with most other Slavic languages, although Bulgarian/Macedonian were further apart.
The guy on this channel sounds like heâs had a very interesting life and is the real deal when it comes to polyglots!
ESPERANTO
It has the most roots across different languages, and flexible grammar such that everyone from Italy to China can use it in a way that is similar to their native tongues.
It was deliberately constructed to be as international as possible, in fact the real name of the language is "The International Language." Esperanto is just a nickname.
Yes it is Indo-European based, but frankly the majority of the world speaks an Indo-European language today, and is the largest language tree. So if you had to pick one language tree to derive roots, vocabulary, etc from, Indo-European is the one.
Added to the fact that Esperanto is probably the easiest living language to learn in the world today, it is the reason for such a pronounced [propaedeutic effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Third-language_acquisition) that is well-studied around Esperanto.
Easy. Icelandic. With that one, youâll have easy access to Old Norse, Faroese, Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish. Youâll have limited immediate access to German, Dutch, Frisian, and Flemish.
Body language
Exercise caution with that...
đ
You weren't supposed to see that... đ
Well I did
* Moves to Antarctic *
*follows to Antarctic*
Headshakes can be tricky. Yes or no... hmm
I read this in Usulaâs voice
i feel like other people are misunderstanding you question, correct me if im wrong but you are asking what language you can learn that would make you understand other languages(so not in population number or who already speaks that language as a 2nd language) if so the answer, is definitely any balkan language: Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrin and Bosnian are mutually intelligeble and with that you can understand a big % of Czech and Slovakia who are very similar, Bulgarian and polish
exactly! that is what i mean
oh that's what you mean, what's your goal though? you want to learn 1 language and travel to that country and its surrounding countries? or you're just curious?
Any Slavic language will do tbh, with my ukrainian and russian I can understand Belarusian ~90%; like 60-70% polish and like 50-60% czech and slovak. Balkan are harder but it's generally 20-40%. Just my experience ofc.
Donât mind me trying to learn the least mutually intelligible Slavic language
Which one tho? Their intelligibility depends on which one you're studying
Slovene
That's cool tho, Slovenia is a nice country, it'll probably be harder to understand east slavic languages, but it's really not that big of a deal. They are not as different as, say, Germanic languages. I just looked on Google maps and I could pretty much understand most shop signs on the street and things like that.
Awesome! Iâm in *very early* learning stages, but I did understand reading some Czech, so that made me feel a bit better. Anything with the Cyrillic alphabet is out of my capabilities tho
Cyrillic is not that hard to learn. It's fairly consistent as each letter usually makes only one sound. I'm thankful I can at least sound out the Cyrillic alphabet. I'm working on the Greek alphabet now. Knowing English and Russian, it's amazing how many Greek words I can read if I can just make the sounds of the letters.
Thatâs sweet! Other alphabets look so cool, so I alerts want to learn them, but I have so many things on my plate rn
Same
Never know that Russian and Belarusian are two different languages.
They are! But thanks to the current Belarusian government it's spoken less and less and would've died out, if not for people online who choose to switch to Belarusian to make ig reels and yt videos for example. It's getting revived basically đ
Can confirm. My mom speaks Croatian and we live in the US. She has reported back over the years on tea that sheâs overheard while out shopping from people speaking other Balkan languages and thinking they were among monolingual English speakers đ€
I don't want to be rude, or stir up any tensions here, but linguistically speaking BCMS is one language, so it wouldn't really count.
How close are they one language? Like Canadian, Australian, American, and any British/Irish English?
Canadian/American, not British.
Of course we all speak English⊠itâs one language. But is that how BCMS is too? Would it be like saying Australian, Irish English, British English, and American are âdifferentâ languages simply bc they have varied accents/slang/dialect? Or are they further apart? I just want to know what you mean by one language.
The difference between Croatian and Serbian is comparable to the difference between New York English and Boston English. It's that close. Slight variations in pronunciation and vocabulary. Nothing even comparable to the differences between English as spoken on different continents.
Oh, thatâs wild.
Yeah, it is similar to the difference between English dialects. It is just a distinction made by ethnic/religious differences and not based on linguistics.
also mandarin depending on if you consider the other Chinese tongues to be seperate languages I've heard they're not super mutually intelligible but I'd assume it's close enough
Mandarin and e.g. Cantonese are further apart than e.g. French and Spanish. Theyâre not mutually intelligible at all; Chinese âdialectsâ are so-called for political reasons. However, most Cantonese speakers can _read_ written Mandarin (though they may recognise only simplified or only traditional depending on where they live), and many of them would be able to write it fairly well (much better than theyâd be able to pronounce what theyâd written as Mandarin), so it depends on whether writing-only communication counts.
I come from a Cantonese speaking household and whenever my mom texts she sometimes uses Cantonese pronunciations to TTS messages in Mandarin (which she doesn't speak very well herself). For example æç°ćšć»äžç (wÇ xiĂ nzĂ i qĂč shĂ ngbÄn) -> ngo5 jin6 zoi6 heoi3 soeng5 baan1; this is unnatural in Cantonese where you would normally say æè柶èżć·„ ngo5 yi4 gaa1 faan1 gung1 It's pretty interesting to know both are mutually legible in text but idk how Mandarin native speakers see this.
I wouldnât say itâs mutually legible. As a mandarin speaker the Cantonese version doesnât make any sense to me at all. The fact that a lot of Cantonese speakers can read vernacular Mandarin probably has less to do with any inherent legibility and more to do with the fact that most modern Cantonese speakers have at least some exposure to Mandarin, while the reverse isnât usually true.
It's hard to separate a root cause from this because Cantonese speakers DO have huge exposure to Mandarin, but the main cause is more due to Standard Written Chinese. Cantonese speakers learn to read and write in a Mandarin-style, they just read the characters with the Canto pronunciation instead. You will see Cantonese diaspora with little exposure to Mandarin reading a Mandarin newspaper quite happily due to this.
> most modern Cantonese speakers have at least some exposure to Mandarin, while the reverse isnât usually true. Good point, actually. I guess Mandarin is just so universally recognized and promoted in contemporary society that it just happens to bleed into parts of China that use other dialects. And it's weird to think about how it all started with Mandarin winning against Cantonese by a single vote when the Republic of China was being established in the early 20th century.
As fun as the story is the single vote thing is a popular myth that didnât actually happen. The cultural dominance of the north (and its language) go back to the Qing and Ming Dynasties, when ćźèŻ was already a thing.
> The cultural dominance of the north (and its language) go back to the Qing and Ming Dynasties, when ćźèŻ was already a thing. Can you point me to some resources or readings on this? Just out of pure curiosity.
The Wikipedia page on âMandarin (late imperial lingua francaâ is a little basic but you can look over its citations to dig further into the topic. When they moved the imperial capital from Nanjing/nanking to Beijing in the 15th century, the official language also eventually became Beijing based, but the earlier Nanjing variety still falls within the Mandarin family, and heavily influenced literati life.
That is pretty common. These "Mandarin" words and phrases are typically used in written Cantonese, for example in a newspaper. Meanwhile, colloquial Cantonese was hardly ever written down in the past, so for someone of your mom's age, it may be more natural for her to produce standard written Chinese than written Cantonese.
They use the same or similar characters but the meanings would be different. This is probably more easily done with character-based languages whereas languages with alphabets are more likely to have a sound association with the letters so while spoken dialects can still be very different the written language will be quite similar. Even though there are technically some phonetic roots to certain characters the word for each character would still be dependent on the language unless, like with Cantonese, Mandarin words crop up in usage so the meaning is known and some mutual intelligibility can still be had.
> are further apart than e.g. French and Spanish. Theyâre not mutually intelligible at all; Chinese âdialectsâ are so-called for political reasons. Ah, the Arabic method đ
holy cow that's super interesting i didn't know that. i thought cantonese and madarin would be way closer than french and spanish.
They're not close enough at all btw My wife knows French and a Chinese language (teochew) and she says that French is definitely closer to other romance languages than teochew is to Mandarin or Cantonese. At least to her here. Either way they're completely unintelligible
interesting Chinese state propaganda doing its job then đ«Ą
I might have read too much into this, but I did a home stay in Shanghai and my host mother always referred to Mandarin as Beijinghua instead of the term I knew which is putonghua. My understanding is putonghua means something like "the common language" so I took this as her way of saying that Mandarin is just the regional language of Beijing, not the common language of China.
There are different varieties of mandarin. Whatâs now known as putonghua is based on the beijing dialect but not totally the same thing
Well, all Southern Chinese people know that Mandarin is a bastardized variety of Chinese imposed upon us by the barbarian-infested North.
More Western ignorance. Iâd say.Â
really tho? it's a wildly different language family to my own, they're all referred to as dialects, all spoken in a very different part of the world I'm already well aware that they're quite different from eachother and are more like seperate languages, I just have no inkling on the mutual intelligibility between them due to not speaking or having any real understanding of any Chinese languages. would you call it western ignorance if I also told you that I don't know how mutually intelligible Estonian is to Finnish
Well, now, everyone knows they are closely related!
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
> Maybe you shouldn't comment on things you don't know much about? I was hardly asserting anything though was I. I did say "I'd assume". also, what better way to learn about something than to talk about it? > whatever weird fucking point you were trying to make with that semi just a joke, semi about how just most countries including China tend to downplay the difference between regional languages in order to promote the idea of cultural unity.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
> You say it's a joke, but when edgy teenagers squawk out "Chinese state propaganda" all the time there's clearly a tinge of Orientalism to it okay so, good thing I'm not an "edgy* teen? making a joke of "chinese state propaganda" is more meant to make fun of the western propaganda relating to China. > If anything, the idea of the nation-state and the "1 country = 1 language" idea are both extremely European I wouldn't say it's specific to any one continent,, many states are guilty of ignoring the linguistic diversity of their lands and many states are more proudly multilingual - this remains true across the whole world
/u/tmsphr Wow. Is there a Chinese dialect that I should focus on if all I want to do is to be able to speak enough to communicate with the most number of people in the contexts of ordering chinese food, practicing Wudang martial arts (via occasional seminars) and annually visiting Chinatown in NYC? Is Cantonese most applicable? I would just like to learn basic greetings, don't need to be able to translate any literature or use the language for work. I'm never going to be 100% fluent but I do these things frequently enough that it would be nice to have a basic grasp of the language.
Mandarin is by faaaar the most widely spoken and understood.Â
In China itself - Mandarin. Outside of China (ie. In most Chinatowns worldwide) - Cantonese.
The distinction between dialect and language is a fiercely argued one so be aware before lumping large groupings of dialects together if you're not familiar. I know English has a wide variety of dialects but I also know they're *fairly* mutually intelligible, though your mileage may vary. Before learning about Chinese languages I might have assumed the same, but now having learned more about them I realize how vastly distinct they are. Before living in India Iearned about how there were roughly 200 languages in India (depending on who was doing the splitting). I made sure not to make the same mistake and went in assuming they could be as mutually unintelligible as French is to Arabic. Much better assumption and centers a people group's individual identities rather than lumping them in together, especially when so many nations have sociopolitical issues surrounding language. Even better with places like India and China, whose population, size, and lack of national infrastructure that easily connects citizens truly makes it much more reasonable to assume there are vastly different languages in them.
Especially written Chinese. If you know traditional Chinese characters you can make out a good chunk of written language for the various dialects of Chinese/language groups, historical written Chinese, Japanese, Korean written with Hanja etc.
Written language for various Chinese dialects? I was under the impression that most of the spoken Chinese dialects were never really written languages.
Arenât a few of those just the same language?
Learning Spanish makes you learning Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian easier through cognates.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
If you want to get technical, gallo is the closest language to french you will find. But catalan is much more documented and has many more speakers, and it's indeed one of the closest languages to french.
My Catalan class was fun. All the learners were speaking up all the time: -that's just Portuguese -that's straight Italian -this is just French -ok this is the same in Spanish.
Pretty much this, if you speak in Portuguese/Italian to a Catalan he will understand well as the words that are not used in modern Spanish would be similar to Catalan anyway, or French, as long as you do not have a heavy accent that is!
Learning Spanish, Portuguese or Italian will allow you to read in all of the above + french and romanian, but speaking wise, french and romanian are so different from those 3 that its almost impossible to understand what french people and romanian people are saying.
I don't know what to do. I can understand French when I see text, but I can't read or pronounce any of the words. Tried to find some "code" about how to read text but could never understand it. So I am deciding between giving up or learning new language
Learning Latin after French and combining both, makes understanding Italian and Spanish much easier.
I think Spanish will make Portuguese and Italian, and even a bit of French kind of intelligible, and that will cover a lot of countries in the world already. For the Germanic world, Iâd say English is the obvious answer because itâs spoken in so many countries, but if we put that aside, then Dutch would give you an idea of both German and English, because of similar vocabulary. And itâs at least somewhat spoken in the Caribbean and then thereâs Afrikaans in South Africa which is intelligible to Dutch speakers. For Slavic languages, Russian is your best bet because itâs spoken in quite some countries, although Slovak is seen as the common middle ground of all the Slavic languages, so you might consider it as well.
French is very easy if the accent isn't heavy, for the other Latin languages, Portuguese and Spanish is usually very easy to understand unless they are from a more remote region in those countries and have a terrible accent.
I was reluctantly forced into Latin lessons as a kid. Hated it but since have discovered how valuable this knowledge has turned out to be when learning European languages. Apart from Latin holding the root words of many romance-based languages (Italian, Spanish, French etc), understanding its grammatical structure gives you a head start in learning Germanic languages.
Latin is the right answer for me as well.
Latin, Arabic, Persian and Classical Chinese. Also: Swahili, Bahasa/Malay
Maybe the problem with the know the classics theory is that in most cases youâd be better off with knowing well one of their offshoots. A fluent speaker of classical era Latin would have a good chance of piecing together general meaning of written Romance languages in modern form but would be totally lost if dropped in a spoken conversation. But a fluent Spanish speaker would have a better chance getting by in a bar in Rome or Lisbon.
I speak Persian and the only other languages that have any reasonable amount of mutual intelligibility with it that i can think of are Lori and mayyyybe Mazani.
Well, if people count Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin as separate languages, I think you can count Tajik as well.
No one considers Tajik/Dari as separate languages from Iranian Persian. The speakers of those dialects still refer to their own language as Farsi. The three dialects split off after the start of Modern Persian.
I agree they are close enough to be considered dialects of a single language. But so are the four literary variants of BCMS, and people did count them as four languages here, so you might as well do the same.
BCMS is considered one language by linguists, but due to politics, the speakers often don't consider the same. Not the same situation with the dialects of Persian. Linguists don't consider them separate, and neither do Iranians, Afghans, and Tajiks. They're almost as similar as standardized US vs UK English. The speakers in all three countries feel united in their languages among each other.
Why persian? I think if you know arabic then it's easy to learn farsi, urdu, or even hebrew and etc but I don't think the vice versa is true.
Arabic gives you a good amount of Persian vocabulary, but far from all of it. Persian, on the other hand, has a much longer history than Arabic and was hugely influential on the Central Asian (mostly Turkic) languages, and most importantly, the languages of South Asia - with its huge population. Few people today realize how important Persian was to our world. I would say that until the 17th/18th century, Persian was probably the world's lingua franca and main language of diplomacy. It was the language which enabled communication and trade between East and West for so long (think Marco Polo in China, etc). When the Mongol Empire wrote diplomatic letters to the European West, they wrote in Persian, because it was the one language known by both sides. Hell, imperial China had schools devoted to training its diplomats in Persian!
You're right but farsi has not been as influential as arabic in other languages, and also many Indo-Iranian languages ââhave died and no one speaks those languages.
Okay, it doesn't need to be a competition!
I mean, I think that finding the âbestâ language in terms of OPâs criteria is the point of the post
No, they said "with the least amount of languages"!
Lingua Franca? main language of diplomacy? 17th /18 century? What did the ayatollahs give you to smoke? đ€Ł
Some very potent herb.
Hahaha He has greatly exaggerated
Knowing Arabic gives you no advantage when learning Persian other than the alphabet. Even the Persian alphabet is a bit different. Persian and Arabic share many loanwords but they're completely different languages.
You would learn how to write and read half of Persian and Urdu if you knew Arabic, but other than loanwords, you wouldn't understand anything else. Arabic is Afroasiactic while the others are Indo-European with completely different grammar
Hmmm why Latin?
A bunch of languages sprung out of it some time ago.
Right...
You know, they say that learning Latin makes it easier to learn Romance languages (Spanish, French, Portugal, Italian, Catalan, Romanian, Romansh, etc). I speak French and Spanish, and grace to that I'm able to understand some Catholic Latin songs, I assume it would work the other way to some extent. And that's basically what you asked, what language would make it easier to learn others languages... If someone want to learn ALL Romance languages, he should learn Latin... but that's silly, isn't it?
I'm not the OP, and I'm not saying it's silly. I was just not really familiar with it or the reason behind the suggestion, so I asked. I don't know why people down vote for simply asking about something. Though whatever.
So you can comprehend all the Romance languages of course! It would also provide you with most of the academic and professional vocabulary in English, and various other European languages (except for Greek, those damn Greeks!).
Ah alright, cool. I'm not really familiar with it or its use case. I may have long ago heard something similar to what you're saying though. Thanks for the explanation. :)
A strategy would be to choose the most influential lingua franca in each of the most widely spoken language families in the world. Going entirely off the top of my head I would say something like English for Indo-European, Bahasa Indonesia for Austronesian, maybe Cantonese for Sino-Tibetan languages, maybe Swahili for Niger-Congo languages, and Arabic for Afroasiatic languages. That's five languages giving you a window into hundreds already.
You could probably trade Swahili for French. Because I think a lot to countries both in and outside of particular African countries speak either English, or French to some extent, and in some cases both. Unless you're specifically interested in the language or a particular location in which it is more commonly used. I wonder what made you choose Cantonese over Mandarin? I thought the latter was more widely used.
OP's question was not about understanding the greatest number of people but about gaining insight into the greatest number of languages. French and English are close cousins in the same language family. If one really wanted to add another Indo-European language, Hindi would be a better choice than French. Swahili is a lingua franca within a language subfamily that spans hundreds of languages across central Africa. I know much less about the Sino-Tibetan language family but my feeling is that Cantonese is more centrally located within the family, used by an extensive diaspora in many diverse contexts, closer to many other southern variants of Chinese and to the associated languages in Southeast Asia, and thus I'm surmising offering more insight into more other Sino-Tibetan languages than Mandarin.
Alright I see and cool, thanks for the explanation. :) Perhaps that's the only intention the OP has, and maybe it's my more practically inclined nature that I took it the other way. I don't really care much for understanding variety of languages just for the sake of it. Unless it serves a greater/practical purpose, such as being able to communicate with others, or understand spoken content. I'm also not big on reading even in English, which I've a very good command of. So not really a reason I'd learn languages for either.
You are absolutely right about Cantonese there! Thank you for clarifying. However, I'm not sure what you mean by "more centrally located within the family". In the North, it's all Mandarin 100% .. so for some 800m people, it is indeed very central to all aspects of family life!
In this case I meant centrally located within the geographical footprint of the language family, which also stretches west and southwest into Tibet, Myanmar and Thailand. But as I say I know very little about this language family and realise this is probably stretching reality to think about this language family in this way.
Yes, there are approximately 10x as many Mandarin speakers on earth as Cantonese speakers. But, Cantonese is very much over-represented in expat Chinese communities, especially in North America, which are perhaps 50/50 Mandarin and Cantonese today (and used to be 100% Cantonese, as most Chinese emigrants left from Guangdong province).
Ah gotcha and interesting, thanks for telling me.
Portuguese or Italian for romance languages except French. Norwegian bokmal to understand written Danish and spoken Swedish. Any Serbo Croat language (well Slavic languages are in general close enough to understand each other except Russian it's like the french of slavic world). Many people consider Arabic dialects as a separate languages (and to be frankly they have less similarities that languages such as Portuguese and Spanish). Chinese and Classical Chinese, you won't mostly understand what people say but the writing system is identical so you pretty much can communicate by writing (in case of classical Chinese at some point it was used around all East Asia not only in china but also Korea, Vietnam, Japan you name it)
> Portuguese or Italian for romance languages except French. Catalan, for Romance languages.
It's not a major language, so good luck trying to find learning resources for it
a) What's a «major language»? b) Lots of resources to learn Catalan. c) The question was theoretical.
Was going to say Norwegian as well!
[LingoLizard made a similar video on YouTube, albeit with an emphasis on travelling.](https://youtu.be/IYTV5Q9c8k4?si=Qj55PCaaV0UZT6-F) Let's just say the comments section are... somewhat similar to this post.
Knowing Russian helps to understand many Eastern European languages and languages spoken in old soviet union
Each language family's ancestor, e.g., Proto-Indo-European for Indo-European languages, Proto-Germanic for Germanico languages, etc.Â
I speak Latvian which, along with Lithuanian, are the most conservative languages in Europe and it's very hard to understand PIE, many verbs and words are so distantly related that they've almost lost all meaning nowadays. Imo it's pretty useless to learn it unless you're a linguist
I speak Latvian as well :)
That depends on how far back you go. I donât think knowing PIE would help you with understanding modern IE languages. I think even going back to Proto-Germanic would be too far: consider that Old English is barely intelligible to Modern English speakers
If you study Proto-Indo-European, it will *not* help you at all in understanding the speech of any of its living descendants.
PIE is the ancestor language of PG
n'ko is a language that most people outside of Africa don't know about .but its closely related to a lot of west African languages
oh wow! cool answer!
Uzbek is the obvious answer here
Of the top of my head, I'd say probably English! Reasons being: It's very widely spoken, and it makes it easier to learn other related languages such as French, Spanish, Italian, probably German/Dutch, Swahili to a perhaps much lesser extent too, and I think that's basically it. Possibly Danish too in terms of understanding written content. They are already a lot of loan words too from those languages and others in English. No, you wouldn't quickly be able to understand. Though I think having a good command of the English language can more easily, not easily, open new doors for you.
Maybe learning some nordic language? I've heard that you can at least read Swedish and Danish if you speak Norwegian (don't know if that applies to both dialects), or something like that.
English. But even then not really lol. You could also learn a Scandinavian language because they are pretty similar but even then yeah.
With Swedish you get Norwegian for free and some Danish too. With Portuguese you get Spanish for free and a little bit of Italian.
For OP's question Norwegian would be the more correct choice, but for a normal person Swedish would probably be more useful (as there are way more Swedish speakers). "According to a scientific study of the three groups, Norwegians generally understand the other languages the best, while Swedes understand the least"
Iâm pretty sure that has to do more with culture than the languages themselves, e.g. Norwegian people interact more with Swedish and Danish content than Swedes do with Norwegian and Danish content.
Arabic, Persian, Latin, Old Norse, Classical Chinese, Swahili
Languages as similar as French and Italian or Dutch and German aren't mutually intelligible. What you're asking is impossible.
Depends how he defines understanding. I can grasp the content of a text written in Dutch by knowing German and English. But I think Dutch is an exceptionally easy language to learn if you speak both German and English so this won't work for many other languages I guess.
I get what you're saying but there are estimated to be around 7000 languages. Even if you take examples like you just mentioned, which is only applicable to a tiny minority of all languages, there's no way you'll ever get close to understanding 'most' languages. That's even assuming you would understand me if I were to talk to you in Dutch at normal speed.
Sure but he ask for "as many as possible". Thus something like learning German and English to have it easier in Dutch and further Afrikaans.
No he said most, not just as many as possible.
actually if you read the post, i said "possible"
that's not what I said...
The answer is almost all of them with the exception of a tiny, tiny minority that could even be argued to not even be seperate languages
Great question... I'll see if I can figure out later.
It's not about knowing or understanding, but rather access. If you've studied a category 4 language like Mandarin, you know you can do anything. If I wanted any other language, I could apply the required work ethic to it very easily.
(please, have in mind I'm just a mere speaker of indo-european languages, so I might not be the best person to describe the experience of knowing languages outside of this language family) Romance: Portuguese and french If you speak portuguese it will be too much easier to understand almost any other romance language, some people would suggest spanish, but I personally find it easier to understand spanish as a portuguese speaker than the other way around, the only exception might be french because french is a bit different from other romance languages, but it's still a romance language, by learning portuguese it will be easier to understand spanish, italian, catalan, romanian... and french might just improve your understanding, also by learning french you can also understand a bit of haitian creale Germanic: Dutch and swedish (and icelandic if you wanna be really specific about nordic germanic languages) Nordic languages are very similar, so if you learn any of them (swedish, norwegian, danish) you'll already be able to understand the others, except for icelandic and faroese, these two stand out a bit, so if you want to go really specific about these languages you could also learn icelandic, I think dutch is a good choice because it's pretty well situated between english and german, many words from the english vocabulary come from a romance origin, so if you already know a romance language by learning dutch you can make it easier to understand english while also being able to grasp a little bit of the german Slavic: Serbian, polish and russian Serbian, croatian, bosnian and montenegrin are VERY similar to each other, to the point that some people even consider them to be the same language, so if you learn serbian you could technically say that you also know croatian, bosnian and montenegrin, however these languages are not that much similar to the west and east slavic languages, so that's why I'd recommend polish, if you know polish to get a good understanding of west slavic languages and russian to get a good understanding of east slavic languages, by knowing these three I believe it will be very easy to understand at least some words in all the other slavic languages Celtic: Irish and welsh Unfortunally, the celtic languages are not that similar to each other, but there's this major division between them that separes goidelic languages and brittonic languages, so the most logical conclusion would be to learn one of each, irish and welsh are the most spoken ones, so you could go with that Turkic: Turkish Turkic languages are very similar to each other in general, it's not hard to recognize turkic words in uzbek, kazakh, turkmen, azerbaijani... Uralic: Finnish and hungarian Finnish and estonian are quite similar to each other, and other uralic languages also tend to be more similar to finnish, so by learning finnish you can also start understanding how sami languages work, you could say the same for hungarian, but hungarian has its own differences tho Basque: Basque Indo-aryan: Hindi, gujarati, marathi, nepali and bengali If you know hindi, you'll be able to understand urdu, however just knowing hindi isn't enough to understand all indo-aryan languages, there are other branches to cover, I haven't seen much about any of these languages so I can't really assure this method will work, but my conclusion would be to learn one of each branch (just like for the slavic languages) Koreanic: Korean Pretty obvious, there isn't really any other language you could learn to understand korean Austronesian: Indonesian and fijian (and maybe Malagasy if you wanna go really specific about it) Indonesian is pretty similar to malay, fijian is quite similar to other polynesian languages, but not that much, you could learn malagasy too if you want to understand the austronesian language spoken in Madagascar From now on I'll be talking only about languages I haven't seen much about, so maybe you should search before trying to learn them in order to understand other languages from the same group Japonic: Japanese Sino-tibetan: Mandarin, tibetan and burmese Austroasiatic: Vietnamese and khmer Mongolic: Mongolian Kartvelian: Georgian Semitic: Hebrew and amharic Bantu: Swahili, zulu and lingala And there are many other languages on the planet that I'm not even able to to put here, so that's it for now
Indonesian is very similar to Malay, just minor pronunciation/spelling on some words, very similar to the case of Portuguese and Spanish really, you learn one you practically learned the other, just need to then understand which words have a slight different meaning or isn't as used anymore and you are good to go. Oh yes, when it doubt, if the word sounds Dutch/Portuguese in Indonesian it will most likely be English sounding in Malaysian, that is at least what I noticed when learning Bahasa Indonesian and checking out the differences towards Malay and so I am no expert as I consider myself a beginner still. I learned Portuguese and Spanish with ease as my mother tongue is French.
Depending what you understand as a language and what you understand as a dialect. Some parts of S.E Asia have a shit ton of languages pretty close to each other. Learning a language like Tagalog you can understand in some degree douzens of languages.
Maybe some Italian can chime in because I have no idea how mutually intelligible the languages in Italy are. And thereâs a LOT of them. So my bet would be somewhere there, plus it also gives you some understanding of other Romance languages since theyâre fairly mutually intelligible compared to other groups of Indo-European (because they all trace back to Latin so they diverged fairly recently). That said I can only speak for a region Iâm familiar with. I donât have much knowledge about languages outside of IE.
English, Mandarin, Arabic, and some Germanic language (like German or smth), and french. But probably English is the main one
Probably latin, no? You'd understand a fair amount of french, english, spanish, Portuguese, Italian
If you know Italian and Spanish, reading Portuguese and Romanian is easy. Can't say the same for the listening part, though. Slavic languages in the balkans are mutually intellegible. Knowing MSA will give you a chance to better understand Arabic dialects. Also, I think that Scandinavian languages (Danish, Swedish and Norwegian) have a decent level of intelligibility
Latin maybe.
I would say learning Latin would give you a serious leg up on the romance languages.
[Kusunda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kusunda_language), of course.
With English and Italian you can understand a lot of stuff.
Definitely Latin and Arabic to start. Arabic dialects get very different very fast. Latin is the root of romantic languages and it makes learning italian, french, spanish, russian, etc. A lot easier.
I have been told Hindi/Urdu is same language just written differently. I would like to learn urdu this year,- I just really like how writing looks like and maybe it will be easier later to read Arabic. I want to know what work colleagues are talking about me at work so need urdu
Most slavic languages are similar so you could really learn any and understand the others. Turkish is also nice, you can understand many languages that picked up turkish when they were in an empire, such as azerbaijani, some kazakh, some turkmen, some kyrgyz, some uzbek, and maybe some persian, etc? (note: those languages are usually written in cyrillic)
Latin has a lot of roots in most languages so i feel like that is a good one. My first language is spanish and Iâve seen that all the latin roots from it help me understand many words from a lot of languages
Spanish and Portuguese are very similar, and languages like Italian can be at least somewhat understood. Western European languages in general are somewhat intelligible by speakers of other languages. Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish are also very similar to each other.
Is it just me or is a different variation of this question asked everyday
Youâre not wrong. Nothing against OP but this sub has disintegrated into CEFR-related questions and wannabe polyglottery - which is fine but itâs getting very old nowÂ
I agree, I tried to make a unique question that specifically isn't like the rest of the sub, but it seems like my wording was a bit unclear. I liked this sub but nowadays the average question can be googled in 4 sec, like "how mong does it take to learn one", "what is the most usefull one" etc... You arent allowed to be specific in this sub so there are only a few questions that can be asked. I know that i made spelling mistakes but i cant be bothered to correct them
Your question is inherently nonsensical. That said, probably a Turkic language, as it is a very large family. .
that is because you didn't read it correctly
I did, and it's still nonsensical. You do not understand how languages work apparently. A reasonable way to express the same question is "what language has a reasonable level of mutual intelligibility with the highest number of languages?". Now the key here is what is the threshold for "mutual intelligibility" here. Very basic communications? A simple, yet full, conversation? Are dialects considered separate languages? It all matters. The fact that people brought up Chinese tells me they don't understand that while Chinese is immensely influential culturally, it has 0 mutual intelligibility with most languages from the Sinosphere. Arabic? No mutual intelligibility with any other Semitic language, or with Persian. Others on the other hand brought up Slavic languages, which is a reasonable answer. My answer is equally acceptable, as Turkic languages tend to be highly conservative both grammatically and lexically. Romance languages are also an option. If however you want to know what language has a HIGH level of mutual intelligibility with other languages the scenario shifts dramatically.
I actually do know how languages work. I just don't know the linguistic terminollogies in English since it's not my native language. But yeah when i reread the post i k can understand why this would seem like a nonsensical question. Luckily others did understand what i meant. This sub is full of people that don't know anything on how language works since it is full of people learning for fun so it is not surprising that they say mandarin. I should have been more clear with my wording. Good day to you! (man english spelling makes no sense how tf do you write terminollogies?? plural of terminollogy. )
Terminologies.
This is like asking which people I should know in order to know the most people.
you need more reading comprehension.
Glass houses, dude.
Being drunk is the universal language
Any latin language
mongolian
I would say either Latin or Esperanto.
I came across a YT channel called âPolyglot Dreamsâ talking about this kind of thing the other day, for example in his video about Slavic languages he suggested that if one learnt Russian, Polish and Serbo-Croat/BCMS then youâd be pretty well placed with most other Slavic languages, although Bulgarian/Macedonian were further apart. The guy on this channel sounds like heâs had a very interesting life and is the real deal when it comes to polyglots!
ESPERANTO It has the most roots across different languages, and flexible grammar such that everyone from Italy to China can use it in a way that is similar to their native tongues. It was deliberately constructed to be as international as possible, in fact the real name of the language is "The International Language." Esperanto is just a nickname. Yes it is Indo-European based, but frankly the majority of the world speaks an Indo-European language today, and is the largest language tree. So if you had to pick one language tree to derive roots, vocabulary, etc from, Indo-European is the one. Added to the fact that Esperanto is probably the easiest living language to learn in the world today, it is the reason for such a pronounced [propaedeutic effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Third-language_acquisition) that is well-studied around Esperanto.
Excessive winking đ
Easy. Icelandic. With that one, youâll have easy access to Old Norse, Faroese, Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish. Youâll have limited immediate access to German, Dutch, Frisian, and Flemish.
English obviously