LucarioLuvsMinecraft wrote:Spanish, French, and even Italian originate from Latin, so that makes sense that at least a word or two would have similarities.
If you know Chinese, Spanish, and English, then you're set for the world.
Oh, haha, that's not what I meant. Strictly speaking, almost all languages in Europe and down into South Asia are descended from Proto Indo-European, so I am well aware of cognates existing. Latin and Classical Greek considered each other completely foreign when they were contemporary, but you can still find words that are similar between them. Ex: Deka[Gr] and Deci[L] both relating to factors of ten, and the hard 'k' to 's/c' shift actually follows a frequently documented rule of linguistic shift in the Indo-European language family.
What I meant when I was surprised about there actually being semi-intelligibility between French and Spanish while listening, is that recognizing a cognate while reading, where you have time to actually examine it and mull it over, and catching the significance in a long trail of speech where things like accents, alternative conjugation/syntax patterns (although as Obnosim pointed out, this particular aspect is less of a factor between French and Spanish), and straight up cultural differences in actual USAGE of words can make hearing a phrase a thousand times more difficult than reading it. It's like someone With a deep Cajun accent not being able to understand someone with a heavy Ulster accent, or a Scottish whose accent is so heavy that it actually affects their dialect toward nearly speaking Scots. They can be using very similar words, but because they form sounds so differently, they can have very minimal understanding through speech alone.
Also, it's funny to me that you pointed out "even Italian" as being descended from Latin, as if that's the surprising one. Italian is the most direct descendant from Latin with the least Celtic influence, due to it not really leaving the area where Latin was primarily spoken as a living language.
As mentioned before, as an English-speaker, if you happen to have a particularly large vocabulary, you will find it easier to notice and remember accurate cognates in other Indo-European languages, whether they be Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, Slavic, Semitic, or even actually the Indian language groups. I would hardly call that "set". There's still all kinds of grammar issues. English has dropped many of the grammar formalities/consistencies the Romance languages retain. Spanish and Italian developed a nearly entirely different set of phonemes from the Germanic and Scandanavian languages (Try getting a Romance speaker other than French to accurately say a Norwegian word containing ' ø ', for example). And god help you if you have to try and read a sign in a slavic language, even if you do have a language like Polish, that's less likely to bombard you with Cyrillic.
Also, heads up: There is a Chinese script. Not a spoken language that is just "Chinese". There are 56 officially recognized languages in China, that would all be considered "chinese" (of course it doesn't help that China is basically only a single unit when it comes to the state government. there are 6 major regions, and several divisions therein, that have massive cultural and historical differences). The languages happened to all have similar enough grammar that they could use the same ideographic script, even though they had developed a few differences in grammar, and a wide difference in vocabulary.
These form a different major language tree from Indo-European, so they generally have entirely different syntax (as well as Japan, Mongolia, and Korea) from any language in Western Europe.
Also, dude, when it comes to trying to acquire a "base set" of languages to act as stepping stones for travelling anywhere and at least having some communication skills for basic requests, Don't forget the African language families, and the Polynesian and island-heavy regions around New Zealand and Australia. Although admittedly, you'd have your work cut out for you with the nine zillion languages in Africa that may or may not be related to two single proto- families.
