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A combination of languages to briefly cover the most of other languages.
(sh.itjust.works)
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The real MVP
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.
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.
Same, but I've learned to read Portuguese and French by thinking of them as mispronounced words and phrases that I already know. It's not perfect but it kind of works.
I know if you can read Chinese, you can "get the gist" of most Japanese writing and vice versa. I think a lot of east Asian languages trace their origin to or at least have borrowed a lot from China. So probably Mandarin?
I suppose you could go with Cantonese instead of Mandarin. I'm not sure if more languages have more in commom with Cantonese than Mandarin or not, but Mandarin is the second most spoken language on earth. So I'd think Mandarin would have a lot of utility.
That raises an important point: the Chinese language(s) are actually completely unrelated to Japanese, but the writing systems are related—and their partly-semantic nature lets readers recognize some isolated written words (with no indication of pronunciation or syntax).
Does that meet OP’s criteria, since they said they were mostly interested in reading?
If you learned Mandarin, but learned to read Pinyin instead of kanji, the mutual intelligibility of other languages would be totally different.
To add further context--I'd like to emphasize that an understanding of written Chinese would help with Kanji, but like you said, to a limited extent. When reading Kanji, there are cases where you'd have to be cognizant of Onyomi and Kunyomi (Basically pronunciations rooted in Chinese vs. Japanese). Not as important if you are strictly "reading", I suppose. However, this would also not provide insight when reading Hiragana nor Katakana, how particles are used, rules for conjugation (polite vs. casual, past vs. non-past tense, etc.), further reducing mutual intelligibility. In some cases, Chinese characters may be visually identical to Japanese Kanji, yet have different meanings or applications. Traditional Chinese vs. Simplified Chinese is also a whole other topic.
Examples where there is some similarity:
JP: 走る
EN: Run (verb)
CN: 走路
EN: Walk (verb)
Matching characters, unrelated meaning and application:
JP: 勉強
EN: Study (noun)
CN: 勉強
EN: Reluctantly (adverb)
Furthermore, Chinese uses Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word order, whereas Japanese uses Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order. Japanese also regularly uses subject omission, so it's important to consider these things if you're moving from one language to the other. Missing an understanding of these differences could lead to pretty different interpretations of a sentence.
That being said, having a background in Chinese would be more beneficial when picking up Japanese than the other way around, IMO.
I feel a lot of asian languages have some roots here, since they are that old of a civilization. It's a good suggestion. I only struggle to think about how their different writing methods can affect it. And wasn't Chinese so heavy on different dialects?
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.
You already have a gigantic head start with English. Everything you would want to read online is already in English
Except in France 😬
Source: my lil bro researcher.
C'est dur mon ami
Pour lui, oui, moi je ne suis pas un chercheur 😁.
Bonne soirée mon ami !
Italy and Spain too.
Romance language speakers are less enclined to switch to English for everyone compared to Germanic languages speakers
A whole bunch of slavik languages are very similar. I had an ex from Slovakia and she could reasonably communicate in Polish and Czech.
I'm a russian and I can understand written or spoken Ukrainian and Belarussian (although the last one is sadly dying), a side of Bulgarian and a little bit from other ex-USSR languages since they got their 20th century's neologisms from Moscow. Trying to get news headlines on Slovakian, Serbian, Czech and Polish were hit-and-miss tho. Tons of different words, and I recognized mostly names, not verbs, the way I have it with almost any other language written with latin script's forks.
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.
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.
That seems very, very useful. Just encountered french instance's posts. Would love to test it if they appear again. Thank you.
This should fit your need, at least for Romance languages
Based on other responses, I'd say English, Chinese and Spanish cover a lot of territorry. Are there any suggestions for African and Indian languages? In general I think it's logical to look for languages of nations with big cultural influence on other countries.
American Sign Language will get you pretty far in a lot of countries.
I don't agree. Every spoken language has a different Sign Language. If you speak American sign language in Europe, nobody will understand you
Do many people know it? I briefly googled this subject long ago snd it seems there are a lot of sign languages with their differences.
In which countries does it work?
this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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