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
    12·
    11 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·
      11 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
    10·
    11 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?

    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.

    • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      11 months ago

      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.

    • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.worksOP
      2·
      11 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. And wasn’t Chinese so heavy on different dialects?

  • gandalf_der_12te@feddit.de
    9·
    11 months ago

    That’s, while a noble idea, unfortunately impossible.

    There’s simply too many languages. In india alone there is a ton of native languages, which have like maybe a thousand speakers each. Like, every village has their language, which often differs quite strongly from neighbouring villages. Same is true in many places in africa.

    You kind of have to restrict yourself to certain languages which you actually intend to use. Otherwise it’s just unmanageable.

  • TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz
    124·
    11 months ago

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

  • Kalash@feddit.ch
    6·
    11 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
      8·
      11 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
        2·
        11 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.

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

          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.

  • angrystego@lemmy.world
    2·
    11 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.