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
    11·
    10 months 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.

    • Lemminary@lemmy.world
      1·
      10 months ago

      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.

  • TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    10 months ago

    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?

    • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.worksOP
      1·
      10 months ago

      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.

  • Kalash@feddit.ch
    3·
    10 months 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
      6·
      10 months 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 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.

      • Kalash@feddit.ch
        0·
        10 months 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.

  • angrystego@lemmy.world
    2·
    10 months ago

    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.