If I speak Spanish, to what extent am I able to understand Portuguese, Italian, French and Romanian? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Good day,

If I am fluent in Spanish, what other languages would it be easier to learn? Also, how much Comprehensible Input do I need before I can start learning about sentence structure, grammar, and vocabulary?

Thank you.

My understanding is that the Sinitic, Koreanic and Japonic languages are thought to be unrelated, and share vocabulary only through language contact -- primarily from Classical Chinese and spoken Sinitic languages into Korean and Japanese, and between the Koreanic and peninsular Japonic languages before and during the Yayoi period. Correct me if any of that is wrong.

By "lexical similarity" I do not mean mutual intelligibility (which I know is basically non-existent) or sheer number of cognates, but the percentage of words in one language (preferably frequency-adjusted) that would be recognised and at least partially understood by a typical native speaker of another language, including false friends that are not super far removed.

I know that a lot of Japanese words (corresponding to on readings of kanji) are cognate with Mandarin words, but may not be recognisable as such when spoken because they were borrowed from a language belonging to a different Sinitic branch, were adapted to the Japanese phonetic system and/or have diverged further since the time of borrowing. I assume the same is more or less true for Mandarin/Korean and Korean/Japanese.

What I am not sure about is how significant the overlap is. I don't know whether it is 5% or 50% of daily vocabulary, or if it is even within that range, or whether Japanese or Korean has notably more Sinitic loanwords than the other.

Every Austrian knows that everything food and kitchen is really different from German German, much more than any other area of conversation.

I'm learning Czech at the moment and decided to do a little comparison with that language, here some examples. It is interesting how a shared food culture can in some cases outweigh a shared language.

German Standard German - Austrian Standard German - Czech - English

Möhre/Karotte - Karotte - Mrkev (Karotka) - Carrot

Aprikosen – Marillen – Meruňky - Apricots

Pflaumen – Zwetschgen – Švestky - Plums

Auberginen – Melanzani – Lileky - Eggplants

Sellerie – Zeller – Celer - Celery

Johannisbeeren – Ribisel – Rybíz - Currants

Mais – Mais/Kukuruz – Kukuřice - Corn

Pfannkuchen – Palatschinken – Palačinky - Pancakes

Kartoffeln – Erdäpfel (Bramburi) – Brambory - Potatoes

Petersilie – Petersil – Petržel - Parsley

Blumenkohl – Karfiol – Květák (Karfiól) - Cauliflower

Grüne Bohnen – Fisolen – Fazole - Green Beans

Edit - some more:

Meerrettich – Kren – Křen – Horseradish

Tasse – Schale – Šálek – Cup

Most – Most – Mošt – Cider

Federweißer – Sturm – Burčák – not fully fermented wine

Hope you like it and maybe you can pick up some vocabulary from it.

The fact that it’s easier to me to learn Spanish then other people it’s quite obvious, but here’re the problem. It’s in fact easy to understand spanish, as a native Portuguese speaker, but it’s very hard to speak and write spanish, without using to much of my Portuguese. I tend to write words wrongly if they are too similar to the equivalent in the other language, for example the word: certo, which means “right, correct” and the word “cierto” in spanish, which means the same. It’s hard to remember that so much words have so tiny differences. If I’m writing in Spanish, It would be catastrophic, or basically Portuguese without the keyboard suggestions. And when I speak Spanish, it’s basically the exchange of some words, but the exact same sounding in Portuguese, it’s very hard to me, to adopt to the spanish way to explain and express things, I’m doing it all the time in the Portuguese way, but with spanish words. Another problem is to find the correct resources. There isn’t a book or something specific for me, may be in Portugal or Brazil, but since I’m living in germany, it’s hard to find the right book or something that is designated for Portuguese speakers. I guess the same thing would happen to a german, who has to learn “swiss german”. Or to a Norwegian learning Swedish.

I need some advices!

Hello everyone,

Mostly Hindi and Urdu are mutually intelligible for speakers and linguists consider these two as two registers of the same language. Going by rough estimates what would be the lexical similarity between both the languages- in percent. Also,how different is hindi of 1940s from the present form? I believe that hindustani of 150 years ago would most probably sound like modern urdu and it is hindi that took a different path by taking up sanskritization and so the language would be constantly changing/evolving atleast till the mid 20th century.

My experience in north India made me feel that common people still speak more urdu influenced hindustani than shudh (pure) hindi and so is the standard form (pure form) of hindi had been constantly evolving from the 19th century by inducting sanskrit words ?

Also historically what percentage of the subcontinent (I am referring to north india) would have been hindustani (hindi+urdu) speakers (as first language) if we are to assume that dialects like haryanvi, bhojpuri and awadhi were treated as different languages back then.

I’m researching the lexical similarities between some languages that English speakers tend to assume are very close. But, after searching the internet for a while, I can’t find a value for the lexical similarity between Dutch and German. Anyone know what it is / where I can find it?

Hello Stranger, I've a question that I'd like to ask you. Are you aware of lexical similarity within Europe? Do you know which languages are so similar that they can understand each other without ever having to study/learn it (even if to a degree)?

I will be a bit more specific just to explain the point of my question. Me - a person from Slovakia; am currently updating my CV and I always wonder whether or not I should put Czech as one of my spoken languages. For us (meaning CZ/SK) it is a nobrainer, because we understand each other, but were you aware of that?

Also to add a litte more from my side, for example I know that former Yugoslavian countries can understand each other; I know that Romanians can understand Italian. I know that CIS region can understand each other. I think Spanish can understand Portugese; and I'm really just guessing that Scandinavians apart from Fins can understand each other, to a degree.. Please correct me if any of these are wrong.

Your answers will be highly appreciated!

I'm trying to find a chart/table with lexical similarity values such as the one on the Wikipedia page, only bigger and having more languages included.

My goal is to make some visualizations (such as PCA plots and heatmaps) to show visually how close every language is to another.

Any help would be appreciated! I'll post my graphics here (if allowed) after I finish or I can share privately. Thanks in advance!

What is a concise definition of each of these and how are they different? Also, how are they calculated?

I ask because I've seen some confusion regarding the lexical similarity of some languages and whether one study did one or the other.

Also, what is in a percentage? Doesn't 89% lexical similarity between Portuguese and Spanish mean in a given set of a large selection of words, an average of 89% of terms are cognate? (i.e. also have mostly similar meanings as well).

And therefore, what does it mean when Spanish and Italian have a lexical distance of "41" like in the map below:

Particularly, Konstantin Tishchenko's map of lexical distance.

Or when Russian and Ukrainian have a percentage of 86%:

Girdenis & Mažiulis lexicostatistical research

As far as I can see lexical similarity doesn't seem that high amongst most Bantu languages. Obviously languages like Zulu and Xhosa have a high level of lexical similarity but that's because they're arguably dialects of the same language.

Yet when you compare languages like Zulu and Xhosa even with other Southern Bantu languages like Tswana and Shona the lexical similarity seems quite low, you can compare the same text in both languages side by side and they look totally different, it's difficult to find many similarities.

In contrast Germanic and Slavic languages, for example, tend to have a very high degree of lexical similarity, sometimes up to 80-90%, you can put the same text side by side in the different languages and easily spot clear similarities.

It seems that the number of common Bantu words shared by all Bantu languages is actually quite limited, in reality most Bantu languages seem to have low lexical similarity and seem to have a developed largely unique vocabularies.

I saw some time ago a streamer playing this game, but despite my best efforts I can't find it back.

The gameplay was as follow: all the player but one are given a main word(for example: dolphin) and the last one is given a similar word (ex: shark) but he doesn't know he has a different word. Let's call it Felon

Then, each turn, the players would write a word that match the lexical field of their main word (ex : for dolphin it could be sea, or fin, arihole, etc ... ) the goal of the players were to find who's the Felon, and the felon's goal was to survive as long as possible without being noticed.

Thanks a lot for reading !

I am interested in both languages, and merely just deciding on the order in which to learn them. I understand there are stark differences between the two in terms of grammar (case declensions, use of prepositions etc), but if all words were taken in their nominal form, how much of an overlap would there be.

I've read some bogus studies that suggest that there is a 75% lexical overlap, but that seems quite high considering the history of Russian under Mongol Yoke and the history of the Bulgarians under the Ottomans.

I made these lists based on general consensus, they don't necessarily reflect what I believe. Nor did I include every little thing for either side. Let's get to it.

HARD

1. Writing system. Three systems: hiragana, katakana and kanji. The three are combined and there 2,000 characters to learn.

2. It's spoken really fast. Faster than Spanish.

3. Zero lexical similarity with English or any other Indo-European language. You'll be starting (almost) from the ground-up.

4. It is an SOV language, English and most European languages are SVO.

5. It is a Head-final language. That means many sentences with no verb will be backwards to you as well. For example: "Sorry for that" = "That for sorry" (Sore wa Gomen)

6. Particles, such as "wa". There are 188 of them to be exact. They take some getting used to as they definitely have no English equivalents.

7. Honorific system, "Keigo". Basically, you have to learn "formal" and "casual" Japanese. You must also be mindful of the hierarchy of whom you are speaking.

8. Weird "Counter" system.

9. Verb & Adjective conjugations

10. Subject is often dropped.

11. There's a shit-load of homophones.

12. While pronunciation isn't very hard overall, I wouldn't say it's a total cakewalk. There's a pitch accent, and you occasionally have words like "tsutaerarenakatta." The "R" and "Ts" sounds may trip you up.

13. 4 different types of conditionals (ways to say "if").

14. There are many dialects.

EASY

1. Pronunciation is not very hard for the most part. I'd put it around the same level of difficulty as Portugese for an English speaker. Very small set of sounds, most of which are not uncommon.

2. No Case system

3. No articles

4. No plurals

5. No gendered nouns/adjectives

6. Not a tonal language

7. While there are 15 Verb forms, there are technically only two "tenses". Past & present.

8. Only 2 irregular verbs.

9. Word order is more flexible than English I believe.

10. There's more English/Western loan-words than you would expect.

So that's the list(s). Again, I don't necessarily agree with all of these. As a Spanish learner, the gendered words haven't made much of a difference in difficulty for me. I think the weird counting system makes up for the lack of plurals. I'm actually surprised by the number of people who have told me that it being an SOV language wasn't that big of a deal. That's the only thing here that has made me go "Oh, fuck this!". To be fair, I haven't made any real effort at learning Ka

I speak Romanian as my first language and have been speaking fluent English since 11 or 12 . I am 17 now

So as it goes:

Pronounciation 2/10: Probably the only field in which Japanese is far easier than both Romanian or English. I have no difficulties in pronouncing japanese because both japanese and romanian are two languages that (with some minor exceptions) are read as they are written( of course,this similarity is purely coincidental) In fact I had a lot more trouble pronouncing English as a child and still have some trouble now,even If I could have conversations or read books in this language for over 5 years now. Also japanese rarely has two consonants next to eachother,unlike Romanian who can have up to 5 consonants side by side such as the word “optsprezece” (eighteen).I still have difficulties pronouncing that word, trust me .

Language structure : 7/10 . Now in this field I am not sure because one month is not nearly enough to grasp the japanese language structure. But it seems that japanese is similar with latin ,both being SOV languages. Romanian is mostly SVO but you can also use SOV structure. For example “ Eu beau apă” is “ I drink water” and as you can see,the structure is SVO ,but you could also say “ Eu apă beau” which is “ I water drink” and it is correct gramatically and structurally,but it is uncommon to speak like that.

Grammar : 8/10 Japanese is an agglutinative language,romanian is flexionary. Now I ain’t exactly sure if agglutinative or flexionary typology is harder,but verb conjugations seem harder in japanese so far IMO. Also japanese has the polite speech “keigo” which Romanian does too.In romanian ,to be polite ,you’d use “dumneavoastra” instead of “tu” (second person,singular) and accord it with a second person plural verb conjugation.And that’s about it . Comparing keigo to polite speech in romanian is like comparing quantum physics to 6th grade science.

Vocabulary 7/10 : Here one month of learning is truly insuficient to have an opinion about the vocabulary.But so far,it doesn’t seem hard,just very different. English and romanian vocabulary have plenty of similarities,just check this.

Piramidă-Pyramid Triunghi- Triangle Cerc-Circle Fruct-Fruit Just - Just (as in righteous) Limite-Limits Moment-moment Secundă- Second

And so on.However japanese has no lexical similarities with romanian or english

Writing 10/10 No explanation needed here. Anybody could learn kana in 2 months of study. But the difficulty of ka

Hello,

Some relevant background on me: I'm an undergraduate English Literature major from the Philippines. As somebody who plans to go into academia, my interests have started to pretty firmly shift towards comparative and/or world literatures, and in general I would say that my research interests revolve around 'third world' or post-colonial literatures related to Filipino contexts — specifically, for instance, I'm curious about comparing our national literatures to Latin American and East/Southeast Asian literatures, since the Philippines is culturally and politically closest to both regions. Language-wise, my native languages are English, Tagalog and Hokkien Chinese, although I am not literate in the latter. I have also studied Spanish and can read and write in it just a little short of an advanced level (say around B2-C1).

Now, I envision finishing my studies and getting my doctorate abroad, as that's usually the way things go here, and recently I've begun looking up comparative literature graduate degrees from around the world in order to get an idea of what certain admission requirements I might need to start working on as I approach grad studies could be. Specifically, I'm concerned about language prerequisites; obviously, they're the only stuff I can really develop at the moment since my career hasn't started yet, and while I'm far from mastering Spanish, my knowledge of it is already solid enough to the point where I feel that it's time for me at least begin discerning which language I should study afterwards. As far as I can tell most comparative literature departments across North America (and also in Asia) require knowledge of at least two foreign languages for a doctorate, with varying decisions over whether native languages count or not. A few require three.

Now, assuming I start my doctorate in ten or fifteen years time, I can probably use my knowledge of Spanish to learn Portuguese pretty quickly, which would help with expanding my knowledge of Latin American literature and also be pretty convenient if I were to get into a program that would require three languages instead of just two. However, as I said, I haven't mastered Spanish yet, and I'm wary of dabbling in Portuguese before I'm solidly in near-native territory. The other side of my research interests — connecting the Philippines to wider, transnational contexts in its native Asia-Pacific region, instead of merely limiting it to its history as a Hispanic colony — indicate that a

I came across this statement while studying Brazilian Portuguese on Innovative Language.

How true is this statement?

I was kind of suppressed because most people I come across recommend starting from Spanish, then Italian and Portuguese (in order of difficulty).

And yeah I've heard the expression that whichever language you find most interesting tends to be the easy one to progress the quickest.

But for arguments sake let's say that one had an equal amount of interest and passion for each of those three languages, what would be the most pragmatic route to take? All three are around the same difficulty level so I don't think that counts for much.

INTRODUCTION

This post will attempt to explain the differences in how Filipinos and Indonesians see ethnicity and the nature of the two societies. A couple of years ago I did some posts on the Philippines and Indonesia like TL: DR Reasons for the failure of the Philippines’s foreign policy,

The post will be organized as follows

1. LATITUDINAL VS LONGITUDINAL ARCHIPELAGIC STATE
2. AUSTRONESIAN CORE
   1. ETHNICITY AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT
3. ETHNO-CULTURAL DIAGRAM
4. RELIGIOUS-CULTURAL LAYERS
5. MULTIPLE SOCIETIES VS MAINSTREAM FILIPINO SOCIETY
6. HIGHLAND AND LOWLAND SOCIETIES
7. BLOOD, LOCATION, AND CULTURE

Many, like Samuel Huntington's in his book Clash of Civilization (1996) label Indonesia as Islamic, and the Philippines as Western, but beyond these simple labels, people are left hanging. Little is done to describe the structure of the societies, how ethnic groups and religious minorities are organized. The four takeaways from this post are:

• Indonesia is a longitudinal archipelagic state-aligned by trade and a shared lingua franca. The Philippines is a latitudinal archipelagic state orientated loosely by trade with China, and later on, shared religion.
• In Maritime Southeast Asia, there are cultural layers, such as Sanskritization, Islam, and Christianity.
• The Indonesian state believes Indonesia consists of multiple societies. While most Filipinos and the Philippines state assume there is mainstream Filipino society.
• The Indonesian state defines ethnicity by blood and keeps detailed records of regions' ethnic composition. The Philippines' state doesn't keep such data.

This post will be the beginning of a series of posts I will do about Indonesia and the Philippines. The purpose of this particular post is to provide a very rough framework for looking at ethnicity, culture, and religion in Indonesia and the Philippines. I won't get into the "why", that will be for subsequent posts.

I decided to do this post, because Indonesia's importance to the Philippines is understated, and its importance will increase markedly after Indonesia moves its

Hello everyone (especially to the linguists here),

Mostly Hindi and Urdu are mutually intelligible for speakers and linguists consider these two as two registers of the same language. Going by rough estimates what would be the lexical similarity (common words used in both languages) between both the languages- in percent. Also,how different is hindi of 1940s from the present form?

PS: My experience in north India made me feel thank common people still speak more urdu influenced hindustani than shudh (pure) hindi and so is the standard form (pure form) of hindi had been constantly evolving from the 19th century by inducting sanskrit words ?