What is the most efficient set of languages needed to easily become proficient in any language?

Question

I’m not familiar with the terminology to ask this question properly, so I’ll do my best in laymen’s terms.

I’m a native English speaker, so I find certain elements of other languages particularly difficult to hear/discern and to pronounce. For example, I can’t roll my R’s. I also find the different vocal tones of a language like Vietnamese very difficult both to discern and repeat, and many words from Slavic languages are difficult for me to pronounce.

In a hypothetical scenario, say you had an English-speaking child and you wanted to teach him a set of languages that would make him competent at both discerning and making all the vocalizations needed to easily become proficient with any major language. By “major language,” I’m excluding little-known local languages. I’m also ignoring reading and writing. What might be the most efficient set (i.e. minimum number) of languages for him to learn?

P.S. - I first posted this in Learning Languages and then realized it might be better suited here. Apologies if that’s poor form, I can delete one.

Answer 1

Here is a procedure that you could follow, or modify to change the results. First you need a list of major national languages, which means figuring out what counts as being "national" and what is "major". In some countries there is an "official" language, or a "national" language, but the US doesn't have such a legal designation. People "intuitively" know that the national language of the US is English, because it's the language spoken by most people. The official national languages of Switzerland are German, French, Italian, and Romansh – but AFAIK, most people in Switzerland don't speak Romansch. The other problem is that there are small countries like Iceland and Estonia which have national languages, but which rank low in population statistics.

The second thing to do is aggregate similar languages. For example, Bengali and Hindi are different languages and they are both major national languages, and, they are similar enough that knowledge of one substantially carries over to the other – you could merge the two. Following that procedure, the 25 largest languages that meet the criteria are (in approximately population-descending order) are Chinese, Spanish, English, Arabic, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Vietnamese, Turkish, Korean, French, German, Polish, Italian, Romanian, Azerbaijani, Farsi, Burmese, Serbo-Croatian, Thai, Dutch, Uzbek, Indonesian, Filipino.

You might knock a few languages off the list as somewhat redundant, for example you could limit the list to one Slavic language, one Turkic language, one Malayo-Polynesian language, one Romance language and one Germanic language, bringing the list down to 14 (Chinese, Spanish, English, Arabic, Hindi, Russian, Japanese, Vietnamese, Turkish, Korean, Farsi, Burmese, Thai, Indonesian).

An alternative approach is to lighten up on the criterial languages – consider all languages to be equally valid – and also reduce the acquisition standard to "elementary pronunciation competence". You don't have to become fluent in Japanese to be able to handle basic Japanese pronunciation. Also, "Arabic" is not just one language, there are many dialects, and the pronunciation of certain consonants such as [ʕ] differs substantially across dialects, thus you will not acquire a native pronunciation of Iraqi Arabic if you study Moroccan Arabic pronunciation. Likewise, the vowel æ in Norwegian and Swedish is pronounced differently, though the two languages are very similar (also, not phonetically very much like English).

An alternative is to train in the production and perception of the IPA, which is designed to at least enable you to make and perceive any language sound. This doesn't help with Georgian and Slavic consonant clusters. I suggest, then, a list of two: learn IPA, and learn to pronounce Georgian (which is a national language).