If you speak french, you can learn italian in a matter of months, no matter how gifted you are at language learning. The reason is obvious, that is because french and italian use closely related words, and knowing french facile helps you to understand italian facile (easy).

This aspect of language classification is of great interest to the ambitious language learner, because it allows him to learn additional languages easily if he already speaks a related language.

Below you will find drawings that illustrate the closeness of various popular languages and give you a rough indication of how far you are from your goal.

Explanation of the illustrations

• Languages sharing the same yellow spot have over 80% of "transparent" words, that is, a speaker of one language can understand more than 80% of the words of the other languages without studying it.
• Languages in the same orange zone share over 50% of their vocabulary with each others. Please note that languages in yellow spots which are included in an orange zone are still members of the orange zone. For example, German share 80% of its vocabulary with Dutch and more than 50% with Swedish.