How to Learn Any Language 32
Get to Know the Family
Languages have their own happy surprises. For example, Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian overlap. Learn either one, and at no extra cost you get seventy percent of the other. You may want to select a language to learn according to how much bounce it has beyond its borders. Languages come in families, and it pays to know which relations might work for you.
Let’s pursue the Serbo-Croatian-Bulgarian connection. They’re related in diminishing degrees to all the Slavic languages, which include Russian, Byelorussian, Polish, Ukranian, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Macedonian, and Ruthenian. They’re not all seventy percent overlapping, but so what? What if they’re only forty, thirty, twenty percent overlapping? That’s still like having the shopkeeper hand you extra cloth on a second bolt when you thought you’d only bought one bolt of cloth.
You learn so much Italian when you learn Spanish that it’s a shame not to switch over and pursue Italian once your Spanish is adequate. Portugese isn’t far behind, and even French, the Romance language least like any of the others, has enough similar
grammatical features and vocabulary to help you conquer all of the other Romance languages.
Hindi and Urdu, the principal languages of India and Pakistan, are virtually the same spoken language.
Dutch is far more than the language of a tiny nation between Germany and the English Channel. It’s almost identical to Flemish, which along with French is one of the two principal languages of Belgium. Dutch is the foundation of Afrikaans, which along with English is a major language of South Africa. And you’ll have no trouble finding Dutch speakers all over Indonesia, the old “Spice Islands” ruled by Holland for four hundred years.
Get to know the family of the language you’re learning – where it fits in, what other languages it will make easier for you to learn later. What doors in what industries will it open (for example, Flemish and Yiddish for diamonds, Arabic for oil, Swedish for crystal, Italian for fashion)? Over how wide an area is your target language spoken (more Chinese speak Chinese outside China than Frenchmen speak French in France)? Knowing where your language fits into the world mosaic will offer you countless advantages and rewards, and almost certainly the motivation to learn more.