User blog comment:Razlem/How do you prefer to learn a language?/@comment-1883086-20100721064828

Well I think as a linguist, you should know better than to underestimate languages. How advanced have you gone into French? Because yeah, the basic stuff is nearly identical, but the more you get into French you start questioning its relativity to Spanish,(take a look at verb conjugations and their differences, the fact participles have to agree with direct objects, and the whole liason-thing) though most of it has to do with idiomatic stuff of the like. And yeah, language mutuality does spark, though, again, one has to be careful. Ever heard of false friends? Those can really screw things up in close languages! And yeah, the continental Scandinavian languages are pretty intelligible with eachother except for Icelandic. However, if you'll notice, all the intelligibility is limited to understanding the language, rather than expressing it yourself, which really isn't what learning a language is about.