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.
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?
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.
You already have a gigantic head start with English. Everything you would want to read online is already in English
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.
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?
