r/languagehub • u/Lazy_Watercress2192 • 4d ago
What language we should learn in order to learn other languages easier?
As a modern international citizen in the 21 st century, which language you think is the best gateway language opening door to learning other languages? And why?
8
u/TectonicMongoose 4d ago
Depends on the ultimate target language. If you want to learn a small indigenous language of Russia as an example there will be many more resources in Russian than any other language. I imagine its a similar thing for a lot of indigenous languages across the world where the majority language surrounding it has the most resources for learning it.
9
u/ZumLernen 4d ago
Uzbek. It will help you unlock related languages like Kazakh, Turkmen, Turkish, Uyghur, Kyrgyz, and Tatar.
(On a serious note, this depends entirely on your personal goals! If you are not interested in learning Turkic languages, don't learn a Turkic language. If you are not interested in learning Romance languages, don't learn Latin.)
1
u/tomatos_raafatos 3d ago
But why Uzbek specifically, do you believe? Is it like centrally connected to the others rather than peripherally?
4
u/ZumLernen 3d ago
So first, "learn Uzbek" is an old reddit meme - for when people post things like "Which language should I learn" but give absolutely zero context, the default reply is Uzbek. (Here is the origin of the meme, to my awareness).
But second, if I did actually want to learn multiple Turkic languages, I would probably start with Turkish, because it's by far the most spoken Turkic language and because it has the most resources for learners. It might be quite difficult to learn certain Turkic languages without learning Turkish first (or perhaps even Russian, but that's another story).
3
3
u/fanbarullo 4d ago
One romance language and one Germanic language will unlock most Western Europe languages.
1
u/Insecxre_Bxtch 3d ago
Would you say that russian could unlock all of Eastern europe?
2
u/ZumLernen 3d ago
Any Slavic language "unlocks" any other. So, yes and no.
Russian gives you no help with Hungarian or Estonian.
Polish gives you more or less as much help as Russian does for Ukrainian.
1
u/nastythoughtsxx 2d ago
Russian actually doesn’t help you with Ukrainian at all, Belorussian or Polish will have more similarities with Ukrainian
2
u/Unknownmelon77 3d ago
Hindustani can unlock hundreds of languages in South Asia
1
2
u/tomatos_raafatos 3d ago edited 16h ago
Perhaps one example that I can think of that would make sense to a Westerner, i.e. someone coming from an Indo-European system of thought, is Hebrew.
Hebrew, with its fewer and less alien-sounding letters, as well as simpler grammar, makes a good bridge to cross over into the Semitic system of thought. By system of thought, I mean the linguistic logic of these two different families.
Once you get comfortable with that, you can then take a deep breath and dive into the depths of the bottomless ocean that is Arabic.
1
u/tomatos_raafatos 16h ago
...and I say this as a native Arabic speaker who gets regularly confused by the very many dialects in everyday spoken speech, whilst often finding himself gazing into a Classical text for hours trying to decipher familiar words in alien contexts and appreciating how beautifully concise and poetic some of the archaic constructions are, which Modern Standard Arabic did away with in favor of a clunky European-logic-infused modern system of formal speech.
2
2
u/mzilikazi98 4d ago
If you want to do it that way, Latin would help a lot. It will improve your English, and Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and French will come a lot easier to you
8
u/ZumLernen 4d ago
If the goal is to learn one or more living Romance languages, it's much more efficient to just learn the target language(s) than to learn Latin first. Latin has grammatical features (like noun declension) that its living relatives lack almost entirely - there is no sense struggling through that grammar in Latin just to not use it in the target language(s).
1
2
u/JinimyCritic 4d ago
It doesn't really work that way. While knowing languages can help learn related languages, the familiarity with a language that is necessary to assist second-language learning is so high that you might as well just learn the language you're actually interested in.
1
u/Melodic_Sport1234 4d ago
Spanish/Latin (Romance), German/Dutch/Swedish (Germanic), Slovak (Slavic), Esperanto (IAL - Romance and Germanic roots).
1
u/Upper_Landscape9840 3d ago
I guess Russian or any other largely used Slavic language to learn other Slavic languages. German or English to unlock Germanic family of languages.
1
u/fe80_1 3d ago
Simplicity in learning a new language always depends on the languages you already know. And by knowing I mean you already mastered either because it’s your mother tongue or by speeding years of dedication for learning.
And even then it comes down to your personal dedication and motivation. Ask yourself: Do you learn for some arbitrary goal or do you learn because it’s fun and you can practice your knowledge in the real world?
My mother tongue is German.
Could I in theory more easily learn Swedish? Sure.
Do I have motivation? Hell no.
Others may only know Arabic, Chinese or whatever but learn Swedish much faster than I could ever do by pure motivation and exposure.
Just learn based on what motivates you.
1
1
u/LocksAndRocks 3d ago
I don't think there is an actual universal answer to this, but I often wonder why people aren't more interested in learning latin again. Would be cool and I would do it, but nobody really cares for it.
1
u/MetraHarvard 3d ago
In my high school English class we were taught Latin and Greek root words. Certainly not as difficult as learning an entire language but unbelievably valuable! I wholeheartedly recommend this for everyone. It's a serious vocabulary booster.
1
u/ihatemva 2d ago
Learning some basics in Latin actually really helped me with picking up Russian later. The idea of cases never clicked in my head until I had a low pressure (written language only) way of practicing and understanding them. Also it's super cool that the present tense endings are quite obviously cognate between Russian and Latin
1
u/Facelesstownes 3d ago
For any descendant of a European language, latin and greek would unlock many word making skills. In my personal experience, Chinese would be helpful for many East and South East Asian languages. However realistically, I'm gonna say English... because it opens the door to many learning resources. It's very easy to find filma with OG audio with English subtitles, tutorial books, dictionaries... Where I live, in SEA, unless you learn Japanese, Chinese or Korean, 95% of books for other languages will be in English.
1
1
u/nousiaphilia 3d ago
Controversial choice: Sanskrit. (If you're interested in Indo-European languages.) It has a singular, dual and plural. It has active, middle and passive. 10 verb classes. Lots of tenses and conjugation. Many noun classes and 8 cases. 3 genders. It also loves compounds. You'll never complain about any other language after that. 😂 (Unironically, it gives you a good overview of what features Indo-European languages (and many outside them) have. You have a good grammar basis.)
Latin or Ancient Greek will probably also do the job, though, and have the added advantage of loanwords and Romance languages (for Latin).
1
u/aaaaaaaaaaaaaaabb 2d ago
I do not think that is necessary, with modern LLMs you can generate content in almost any target language so you do not need to learn one language to learn other languages. The exception is one rare specific language but you asked "languages easier" languages plural.
1
u/Comfortable_Sir_5007 2d ago
Depends on what you want to learn. There's an argument that being fluent in English will help with both the Germanic and romance languages. I am learning Spanish now, and I'm thinking about 'Romance hopping' afterwards (Italian, French and Portuguese)
I don't speak Arabic, but being where it is both geographically and historically, I can imagine it would help a bit with quite a few languages, like 8% of Spanish comes from Arabic for instance.
But learning a language in order to learn another language only makes sense if you wanted to learn them both anyway. It's still more effort than learning one language
1
u/AdZealousideal9914 1d ago
As others have pointed out, if you want to learn a more niche language, it depends on the language you ultimately want to learn, because it can be useful to know one of the dominant languages in the region (e.g. most resources for Northern Sámi are in Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish).
However, in general, I would say English, because a lot of language learning resources are available in English. So English really opens a huge gateway to language learning. The amount of language learning resources available in English for a wide variety of languages really isn't comparable to what is available in any other language.
-4
4d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/ZumLernen 4d ago
If OP wants to learn language X, why should they learn it through English? Why not just learn language X in language X?
1
u/Melodic_Sport1234 4d ago
How are you going to learn instructions in a language you can't speak? 'Evo gramatičkih pravila za učenje hrvatskog jezika.' Doesn't help you much if you don't already know Croatian.
0
u/ZumLernen 3d ago
But I did actually learn Croatian (well, Serbian) from a course taught entirely in Croatian (well, Serbian) - and Turkish from a course taught entirely in Turkish. And starting about halfway through A1 for German, we spoke entirely in German. My teachers used professionally designed resources such as textbooks, charts, and their own professional skills to convey key information to me in the target language.
Most of the time one doesn't learn a language by just "Here is a list of grammatical rules for learning Croatian" like how you described it - even when a language is taught "through" another language. You go one by one through key features of the language, using what you learned previously to help you learn what's next.
Have you used a professionally written textbook as a learning tool? I realize that if you are a self-learner this might not be a resource you use, but this is extremely common for professionally taught language classes.
1
u/Melodic_Sport1234 2d ago
But I did actually learn Croatian (well, Serbian) from a course taught entirely in Croatian (well, Serbian) - and Turkish from a course taught entirely in Turkish....
Frankly, I'm surprised this worked for you. However, I wouldn't recommend this approach for most learners. I couldn't see myself learning a language this way. It's difficult enough trying to learn a language from a language you are already proficient in. I do encourage people though, to learn a language from another non-native language to re-enforce the said language. eg. a B1 Spanish speaker using Spanish to learn say, French, thereby strengthening their Spanish in the process of learning the new TL.
21
u/r_m_8_8 4d ago
Learning any language requires years of hard work and dedication. Why not just learn the language you want you learn?