Are Swahili and Zulu mutually intelligible?
Pour autant que je sache sont Kishwahili et isiZulu deux langues bantou, mais pas mutuellement intelligible. Les langues bantoues avec proximité géographique partagent plus de mots et de fonctionnalités. Mais peut-être qu’il y a quelques locuteurs des deux langues autour de répondre à cela mieux.
Sover ek weet, is Kishwahili en isiZulu beide Bantoetale, maar nie wedersyds verstaanbaar nie. Maar miskien is daar 'n paar sprekers van beide tale om dit beter te beantwoord.
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Is this topic strictly for grammar and/or vocabulary?
Or is it about way certain language groups thinking too?
I found more similarities between Chinese and Czech, than English (Czech, English and Sign Language are languages I am thinking and dreaming in) or other languages I was learning (although in this meaning I find English, German and Dutch similar)… Or is it just me 
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I speak Czech decently, but I am not able to understand Russian or Ukrainian.
But older folks who learned Russian in school (in communism it was number one language after Czech). Maybe that helped people to understand you? No offence, just wondering
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I’ve tried to learn my languages somewhat strategically like this. English is my native language and I started learning Spanish as a young teen. Once I got to be highly proficient in Spanish, I learned Portuguese, which led me to Italian, which will then lead me to French! Spanish and Portuguese share 89% lexical similarity, Spanish and Portuguese together share a lot of lexical similarity with Italian, and the lexical similarity of Italian with French is quite high! The pronunciation of French is also made much easier, having experienced the nasal vowels in Portuguese. If I were to learn Romanian from here, it would be a Gateway into the Slavic languages, or perhaps even German, because of Romanian’s introduction to cases. Once you learn a grammatical concept once, you can kind of skip it when learning the next language. Another example of that is with the subjunctive and grammatical gender! It pays to be economical with the way you learn languages!
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You can learn Catalan in three months. I learned Catalan in six weeks in 2002 as a complete autodidact.
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After learning some Polish, Czech became easier for me to understand (at least in reading). As was mentioned above, within West Slavic group it is easier. Similarly, Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian speakers would understand each other better.
There is an interesting YouTube channel called Ecolinguist, exploring Slavic languages similarities and differences.
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Chinese. It’s more difficult than japanese. At least I think so.
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Yeah, in Skåne, instead of the rolling R, they use a uvular trill, the prosody is quite different and they have a bunch of triphtongs like “mor” /mu:r/ is pronounced something like /miour/.
My dad’s girlfriend comes from Skåne, and when he comes home after spending time in Skåne people always ask what’s wrong with his accent because he speaks “standard Swedish” with Skånsk prosody 
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It took me a week to be able to say “sjö” without whistling, so I am in no position to make fun of anyone else’s pronunciation. But that doesn’t stop me from saying that my Swedish friend (from Stockholm) would make fun of people from Skåne quite a bit. 
While I wouldn’t say being fluent in Mandarin Chinese gets you Korean for free, it definitely helps with learning vocabulary, especially as you move into advanced/academic territory. Personally, I find memorising Korean words with chinese origins to be a little bit like learning words in other Chinese dialects - it’s the same words, just pronounced slightly differently.
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Well I think many latin based languages belong into that genre. I’ve learned Spanish and French and I once was able to translate a whole conversation between my father and an Italia woman without speaking a word Italian… I also understand a tiny bit portugesue (if they speak slowly) but I think my Spanish helped a bit more than my French…
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Sawubona wenchong / Greetings wenchong
In South Africa the isiZulu language is definitely a “high-leverage” language as you call it.
If you are able to speak isiZulu, it is fairly easy then to learn to speak Nelson Mandela’s native language of isiXhosa, then isiSwati - Swaziland’s (now called eSwatini) national language, and also the isiNdebele language. These languages are all part of the Nguni family of languages.
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I learned American Sign Language and then Quebec Sign Language, I’d say they are about as close as Spanish and Italian.
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So far, I’ve mostly paddled around in the Romance language pool. After four years of Spanish in high school and one semester of French in university, I placed out of three more semesters of French! (The French department was evaluating itself and required everyone to take the College Board placement test without charge.) Accepting those 10 credit hours essentially closed me out of further French study in that context, since I was in no way prepared to take on a French literature class! I was able to read, on a guess-from-Spanish basis, technical and scholarly material for my PhD research, but unable to read a novel in French to save my life. A few years ago, during a few days in France, I could read signage (e.g., information about paintings in a museum, etc) to 95%, understood variably 40%-70% of what I heard spoken, and could not make myself understood in most circumstances.
So the transfer effect has been a mixed blessing: but to the extent described, French was truly a freebie based on prior knowledge of Spanish. (Similarly, Catalan, Portuguese, and Italian are … well, translucent, the more so the more scholarly/technical the material: I have been able to extract bits needed for research, at least.)
I’m now addressing THE REST of French. How to describe my situation? Given the dichotomy of “true beginner - false beginner” I am closer to a false beginner, not a true beginner. But it would seem that I am something more extreme than just that… “false intermediate” seems wrong…
Most instructional materials are not based on building FROM a foundation like that TOWARD full proficiency. And most folks on iTalki have no clue about this sort of situation (or so it appears from my sampling). (Steven Rundle’s books on reading proficiency try to leverage prior knowledge of English, but only toward READING proficiency in the target languages.)
SO: a related question is, how to build efficiently on the foundation of a closely related language? Any tips?
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Unfortunately I haven’t got an answer for you, but this is a very interesting topic and a question I’ve actually been asking myself already. My situation is the exact opposite of yours: I had 4 years of French in highschool and I’ve always been able to read things in Spanish (i.e. newspapers, magazines, graded learner’s books, and the like). I then studied Spanish for about a year and found it to be rather easy, especially the comprehension part. The speaking part was a bit tougher though. But in this one year, I haven’t exactly been building on the foundation I had from French, but rather studied it like I would study a completely new language. … I already thought that, maybe studying Spanish through French could be a good idea, but first I’ll have to get my French back to at least the upper B2 level I once had.
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isiZulu and isiXhosa shares four fifths of words. So if you know the one, you can just additionally learn the last fifth of the second language.
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I think It’s Esperanto, have vocabulary in common with European language. It’s artificial, but don’t overwhelm non native speaker with grammar and difficult sound.
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Learn Syriac (Kthobonoyo or Neo-Aramaic)
Western Neo-Aramaic script functions like an alphabet (instead of abjad)
Result: Get Hebrew and Arabic almost for free, after just a few tweaks.
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@Rina I suggest checking out the EcoLinguist on YouTube. He does a lot of comparison and mutual intelligibility videos in all different languages. He’s Polish and there’s a entire playlist comparing slavic languages
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