>As an English speaker since age 3 I found it both valuable and pleasurably to learn French and German, as the three languages are like the vertices of a common

>As an English speaker since age 3 I found it both valuable and pleasurably to learn French and German, as the three languages are like the vertices of a common triangle I don't know French, but had noticed and said somewhat the same (although regarding English and German only) in an HN thread about Berlin startups a while ago. (Someone said something about the difficulty or otherwise of learning German, and I replied to that.) I noticed while learning German that I could guess the meaning of many German words, because they were similar to English words I knew. Even very light knowledge of Latin (just casually picked up during a lot of reading of English) and some Sanskrit knowledge (studied it in school for a few years) helped, since all are from Indo-European language family tree.