I Want to Learn Many Languages

@Mugin16 I'm still baffled by Lithuanian and Latvian. They've always sounded Slavic to me. 😅 Even their cultural elements look similar yet their language has nothing to do with Slavic. It's like Hungarian and Finnish.

@CrazyMusicLover That's not quite right. 🤔 Latvian and Lithuanian are Baltic, which is a branch of the Balto-Slavic group. They are more closely related to Slavic than any other Indo-European group (I'm half Lithuanian).

@SW-User Do you understand Estonian then? Or not at all?

@Mugin16 Nope. Completely foreign to me. I love the way it sounds, though, I've heard a lot of Estonian music.

@SW-User I tried to find similarities but I always failed :/ I have to take a closer look. Meanwhile, this is interesting, I noticed a few similarities in Romanian which belongs to Romance languages.

@CrazyMusicLover My Romanian friend told they have some Slavic words in their language. It happens when you live close to a language border. In Switzerland, we use some French words in Swiss German instead of the proper German words.

@Mugin16 Estonian is very close to Finnish. It's like Czech and Slovak. I read that Estonians understand Finnish better because Finland is the dominant country - they profit more from knowing Finnish than Finnish people knowing Estonian. But you would have to ask natives for correct information.

@CrazyMusicLover That sounds logical. A Slovak lady once told me that the Slovaks understand Czech better than the Czech do Slovak.

@Mugin16 They need subtitles when they watch movies! 😭😛

@CrazyMusicLover The Czechs?

@Mugin16 Of course. Younger generations. Including my generation probably. :P But that's okay, older generations shake their heads we young don't know any Russian.

@CrazyMusicLover Hahahahahahaha I can imagine. And the even older generation spoke German and Hungarian of course as they grew up in Austria-Hungary.

@Mugin16 Exactly. xD
Many of my peers still speak Hungarian. Even my best friend did when she was a kid but she stopped using it long time ago so she forgot.

@CrazyMusicLover Use it or lose it! It is sad to lose a language but it happens.

@CrazyMusicLover And of course Hungarian is not an Indo-European language! You won't find it on that tree!

@Mugin16 Then Finnish and Estonian can't be too. They're all in Finno-Ugric group.

@CrazyMusicLover Correct. They are not Indo-European languages.

The only other European language which is not Indo-European is Basque as far as I know.

@Mugin16 I don't think Maltese is Indo-European either, but I could be wrong.

@SW-User I don't know. Would be interesting to find out. Might be derived from Arabic?

@Mugin16 aha. It’s a Semitic language, so it’s related to Arabic