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 
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.
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…
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.
I learned American Sign Language and then Quebec Sign Language, I’d say they are about as close as Spanish and Italian.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
@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
I presume languages that are related, particularly ones that are from the same language family, would be high-leverage, to put it simply?
The most common language families explored by polyglots at these events seem to be Romance languages, Slavic languages and Germanic languages (likely in that order).
I guess if you have a high level in one of these languages, that would of course make it much easier to learn another language from that family etc. - many polyglots, myself probably included, speak quite a few similar languages and have almost ‘collected’ them in that way, to some extent, as you can often pick up another language from the same language family almost without really actively trying to (as long as you don’t get confused).
Been a year but I want to show something related to my previous post;
This is a rather basic video but you can see the three largest Sotho-Tswana languages which I don’t think are rather known by most people in here; the girl on the left is a Tswana speaker, the channel owner in the middle is a Pedi and on the right is a Sotho.
As you can see the basic conversation about everyday topic is not difficult to understand for urban speakers assuming that they have prior exposure as they don’t need to switch to English for many of the sections as like when the Sotho girl correcting the Tswana girl that an orange is a “limuni” in Tswana and not “oranji” (they have the same loanwords) albeit naturally with false friends inbetween the three languages. I’ve been told that between rural more diverging dialects it became more complicated, say between a Pedi from SA and a Tswana from North Botswana for example but that’s the same case with most languages I digress.
When I reflect on my personal language learning process, I certainly agree with you. Of course one probably does need to put some effort as understanding key words doesn’t equal basic proficiency in a language; besides there are also false friends and such, but it certainly helps you to grasp sentence structures and grammatical phenomenons much easier if you know already another language from the same family.
Haha, definitely not Hungarian as it doesn’t resemble any other languages. Only the new age words are the same some that you can find in other languages, like hamburger.
I like this way of thinking–one could draw a flow chart and then follow it! You may it sound so easy - leicht - lätt!
Hi Wenchong!I first learned Japanese then started learning Mandarin and recently tackled Cantonese. In my opinion there are limitations to what one can convey in Japanese or Chinese just knowing the characters. Trying to order something using 訂 won’t work, because in Japanese it’s 注文, Drinking is 喝 in Mandarin but 飲 in Japanese, which is the same character in Cantonese. There’s also the problem with the simplified characters, which probably won’t be understood by some people. I hate the 发, 発, 發 difference!!
However, knowing kanjis makes it way easier to work ones way through languages that use kanji.Unfortunately I realized that knowing Japanese, Mandarin and some Cantonese still won’t let me learn Shanghainese without having to learn some other characters such as 啥 掰 侬
Welcome to the messed up world of KANJI!!! 哈哈哈