Synonomous languages?

[Tayzach24]

I am fluent in Spanish and French. I learned French first and realized how easy it was to learn Spanish because the construction and verb conjugations of the languages were very similar. What languages do you find most similar?

[sidney]

I noticed that Spanish and Portuguese are kinda alike, although I'm not fluent in those 2 languages yet.

[mareebaybay]

I mean the one obvious one to me would be Chinese and Japanese. I believe both of those languages are very similar. They have similar characters and words as well.

[linguaholic]

Hey mareebaybay

Comparison Chinese vs. Japanese // Differences between Chinese and Japanese

I mean the one obvious one to me would be Chinese and Japanese. I believe both of those languages are very similar. They have similar characters and words as well.

This is a rather problematic statement :=) Chinese and Japanese are not similar at all. Of course, both use characters and for someone who has never been in touch with those languages (or let's say has not studied Japanese and/or Chinese), they might look similar. However, in Japanese, they have three different scripts being Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. Hiragana and Katakana are scripts from Japan and only the Kanji are derived from China. However, genealogically, those two languages are NOT related at all.

Moreover, Japanese is not a tonal language, whereas Chinese uses tones. What's more, the grammar in Chinese and Japanese is completely different and sadly, Japanese Grammar is really hard compared to Chinese Grammar  :wacky:

[littleredcookbook]

I mean the one obvious one to me would be Chinese and Japanese. I believe both of those languages are very similar. They have similar characters and words as well.

And Korean, too. Chinese characters are used by the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages. (I just learned that recently from a friend who is from Korea!) I believe all three are tonal languages instead of using stress like English and Indo-european languages, which for me, learning Japanese, makes it a bit harder as I tend to respond in class with a higher tone at the end because I'm not that confident in my answer so statements sound a bit like questions. Mandarin, at least, has five different tones (yikes!!) and Korean I think differs quite a bit just between its own dialects. Some use tones and some don't. It seems to be really clearly divided into dialects geographically, just from a cursory internet search. Korean is definitely high on my list of 'to-learn' languages.

German and English have very, very similar structure and a lot of cognates. Dutch is quite a bit closer to German, though, and while British, American and Australian English all claim to be English all three have and are definitely developing away from each other into distinct, well, dialects, I suppose. I'd really love to learn middle and old English and old High German. When I was talking with my professor about German vs. English she mentioned old High German and old English are nearly indistinguishable, which makes sense seeing as they have the same originating language family, and developed apart from old High German when brought to the British Isles by the Saxons, Angles and Jutes, similar to how American English developed away from its mother British English. Sorry, I wrote a novel. Please tell me I'm not the only one fascinated by linguistic history though. Please? lol