[vidarh]

Your personal difficulty with a language will also obviously drastically shift once you've picked up another language.

E.g. I've never learnt Dutch, but I can read it passably because of my combination of Norwegian, German and English. While getting to proficiency written and oral would take some work I'd certainly be far easier than starting from the base of a single language.

Same with e.g. Spanish or Italian because of the bits I remember of French from school..

[adrianN]

There is good evidence that learning a bit of Esperanto saves time learning other European languages (even if you add the time spent on Esperanto)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant...

[tomclive]

Yep, I'll agree with this. I studied Latin for about 8 years at school and enjoyed it, even though at the time I had thought it pretty useless.

15 years later I moved to Spain for a while and was amazed at how naturally everything came together. Within a very short time, I was able to make sense of written Spanish.

Conversationally, not so much but I'm sure the Latin helped.

[ben_w]

Likewise, I have never learned Spanish, but when I saw a Zika-related public service advert on the NY subway when visiting the USA, I could read it easily. (Native English, plus Duolingo German and Esperanto which I estimate as A2 and A1 respectively)

[Iwan-Zotow]

> Zika-related public service advert on the NY subway

Virus is advertising itself as public service on the NY subway?!

Wow!

[noblethrasher]

My Latin teacher often reminded us that ”Spanish is just lazy Latin“.

[silverbax88]

That's a common statement but somewhat inaccurate, as it omits the fact that what most of us think of as Spanish is Castillian, which has a heavy influence from Arabic languages.

[tolger]

Spanish native speaker here. The influence from Arabic is mostly in vocabulary, about 10% of our words have Arabic roots. However, Arabic had negligible influence in structure and grammar. Spanish is your standard Latin derived language.

[JoeDaDude]

As a fluent Spanish speaker, I won't go that far, but now that I am learning Latin, I am amazed how easy it seems. As an aside, I can understand ~80% of spoken Portuguese and maybe ~50% of Italian.

[hollander]

I'm Dutch. In school I had to learn English, German, French, Latin and (old) Greec. I dropped all languages except English as soon as I could. I learnt one thing: I'm good in grammar. So I really understood French sentence structure early on. Looking back I was just an scared kid afraid of making stupid mistakes. Otherwise I could have enjoy it a lot more. Anyway, it gave me a base in English, German and French, and I got some understanding of Latin and Greec language structure, useful for Spanish.

When going to university, I had to learn English because all my books were in English, and I started to like speaking foreign languages because of my holidays abroad, including French and German. I even learnt basic Spanish.

Right now I can say my English is good, and I can live and work in English if I had to. Most of what I write and read is inEnglish, probably more than Dutch. I could learn to speak and understand French and German, but reading is much more difficult, and writing would be a big problem I think.

[gremmer]

* Greek

* all the languages

* I’m good at grammar

* a scared kid

* could have enjoyed it

* more than in Dutch

[jakubp]

In my experience, the difficulty to sort-of understand written foreign language is _nothing_ compared to learning to understand spoken language.

[ptaipale]

It depends. Generally, you'll find spoken Chinese is easier than written Chinese. Chinese grammar is actually quite simple, and it's one of the most "analytical" languages, which make it easier to learn than languages that have extensive morphology. The Chinese script, on the other hand, is difficult.

So, a big difference comes from alphabet. I would guess you'd learn reading and writing Bahasa Indonesia faster than Thai, because the former is written using Latin alphabet, and for Thai you'd need to learn a new script.

Russian is related to English while Finnish or Hungarian is not; most English-speaking people still find it easier to survive in Finland or Hungary, because the writing uses familiar letters (even if the alphabet is expanded with new letters made with adding dots and other marks to existing glyphs).

[tigershark]

Learning to read Russian is extremely easy compared to Chinese even if in both cases they use a non-Latin script.

[ptaipale]

Yes of course. Still, the initial sight of Cyrillic alphabet scares off many people.

[wolfgke]

> Still, the initial sight of Cyrillic alphabet scares off many people.

The only rational explanation I can find for this is cold war propaganda. ;-)

Seriously: About a third of the letters are almost identical to their Latin counterparts. If you study some kind of science you already know the Greek alphabet, to which another third of the Cyrillic alphabet is almost identical. After this the last third is not hard anymore. :-)

Seriously: In Germany they say learning the Cyrillic alphabet is something any slightly intelligent person can do in one afternoon (and I hope I could indeed show this to be true). Unluckily the rest of the Russian language is much harder to learn.

[ptaipale]

I don't see propaganda as much of a reason, it's simply that it looks sufficiently different.

But of course you are right that the alphabet is not so difficult in the end. Different people have different learning capabilities, but that "one afternoon" for the alphabet is not unreasonable. Correct pronunciation of the many variants of s (с, ж, з, ц, ч, ш, щ) will take much longer. I have never actually studied Russian, but can quite often understand newspaper headlines just by knowing the alphabet, and several Indo-European languages and Finnish, which has some common vocabulary.

[gambiting]

Yep. My native language is Polish but I am fluent in English and intermediate in German - I can understand most of written Spanish/French and a lot from Nordic languages. Slavic languages are so similar that I can (with some effort) understand Russian/Czech/Slovakian. While learning another language at this point would certainly be a lot of effort, it would certainly be a lot easier than starting from scratch, especially if the language was Latin/Germanic/Slavic in origin.

[avenoir]

This is interesting. I'm native Russian speaker and outside of catching a few similar words here and there I think Polish sounds absolutely foreign to me. I think just about the only language that I can understand with some effort is Ukrainian.

[viridian]

Belorussian? IIRC Belorussian and Russian are the two most closely related languages that are treated as separate languages and not dialects.

[_Tev]

Closer than Czech vs Slovak? I think around 90% of Czech people understand 99% of what Slovaks say ... It's difficult to measure in opposite direction as its customary to watch Cz TV channels for Slovaks (at least from what I've seen / heard)

[nerfhammer]

I have heard Norwegian and Danish being described as such

[vidarh]

Modern Norwegian is a mix of Danish and dialects from the Norwegian countryside that has then been put through several rounds of reforms intended to bring them closer, which has to some extent made Norwegian more different to Danish, but yes, they're extremely similar. Even more so if you use conservative spellings of Norwegian. 50's or 60's newspaper articles from one of the conservative newspapers for example, might easily get confused with Danish by modern Norwegian speakers (but still be easily understandable).

[chatmasta]

I hear this sentiment from Europeans often, and I’m sure it’s true. But obviously the languages you’re talking about have a lot more in common with each other than they do with say, Chinese or any other “eastern” language.

[vidarh]

Well, yes, it obviously won't work for any random pair of languages. E.g. even in the European languages, you have "famous" exceptions like the very isolated Finno-Ugric language group (in Europe represented by Finnish, Sami, Estonian and Hungarian) that have pretty much nothing in common with the rest.

[smsm42]

Reading passably and being able to converse are worlds apart. Knowing English and some Romance language would get you very close to being able to read at least simple texts in many other Romance languages (not there, but pretty close to there), knowing one Slavic language would get you close to being able to read simple texts on many of them, etc. But understanding conversation and even more being able to participate in one is very far from that.

Knowing Russian, when I was in Bulgaria, I could read signs and even technical books with decent understanding, despite never studying the language. Conversation was completely out of the question.

[IMTDb]

It's not that easy, as a native french speaking person, I have close to 0 understanding of Italian and Spanish. I also learned Dutch and English and those two are much closer.

[vidarh]

I think you underestimate the similarities with Italian and Spanish, and overestimate the similarities of Dutch and English because it's easier to notice similarities when you're looking at two foreign languages where it's the similarities that will stand out, than when looking "closer to home" where the differences tends to stand out.

Though Dutch and English are really quite similar, they're not all that much closer related than e.g. French and Spanish.

During my French-lessons, my French teacher often used Spanish (which none of us knew) as a means of explaining French vocabulary for us by means of demonstrating the transitions in sounds from the latin origins of both, and the same works between French and Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, as well as with many languages further removed from latin that still has plenty of loan words. The same also does work between English and French because of the number of French and latin words in English, but much less so between the other Germanic languages and French.

E.g. try to go to www.repubblica.it (a random Italian paper) and cut and paste a paragraph or two into Google translate with French as the target, and look at how many words are similar. Then try to change the target to e.g. Dutch or German, and you'll see far fewer similarities. Switch to English and you'll tend to find something a bit in the middle.

It does vary a lot - more formal texts tend to be more similar. I can pretty much straight up read very formal Italian by picking up context, based on French + knowing a handful of other Italian words, but I'd certainly find it much harder to read casual comments.

[dep_b]

French is really different from Italian, Spanish and Portugese. Or even Romanian. If you know Spanish you kind of get the idea of what people write in the other four languages.

But I think you get a lot of English during your life if you live in Europe which makes it easier for you to pick it up. There are still more Latin derived words in English than French derived, Spanifying English words is not a bad strategy if you're learning to speak Spanish and you have a feel for Latin sounding words in English.

Dutch? Perhaps if you're Belgian? Not so much overlap with French even though there are influences.

[pif]

> French is really different from Italian...

It's just because of their funny pronunciation :-)

I was born and raised Italian, and got French nationality as an adult. I was able to read French well before I could understand it.

[saiya-jin]

this depends whether languages have same 'base', ie latin ones (french, spanish, italian) - people can learn easily another one once they know any of that group. it wouldn't help with German, Slovakian or Chinese though.