Quote Originally Posted by Marcus View Post
That's a piece of news. (...)
Sorry, Hanna, that I'm always arguing with you.
(I think the expression is "that's news to me" - it's a US like expression though)

Anyway, no, no it's not problem to argue with me and you are right --- there are plenty of languages where I couldn't guess the meaning of a word either. Finnish, Hungarian, Greek...

I was talking about the big languages that people tend to study as a foreign language in school.
These language (for Europe) are (other than English) German, French, Spanish and Russian.

Out of these, French and English have a million words in common, and French grammar is only marginally harder than English, and more regular. German to me at least, is often very easy to guess because it is not very far removed from Swedish. Spanish has lots of words in common with French.... So it all goes round in a circle.

When I was in Romania, a lot of words were familiar from Spanish words that I knew. In the Netherlands a lot of words are similar to German and English, so even if I don't know a word of Dutch I can often understand signs etc anyway.

That's the sort of thing I'm talking about, but it doesn't work for me yet, in Russian.

I am sure a Russian speaker would be able to use this method in Poland, Bulgaria etc.

This also means that if you can sometimes make up words in another language and the other person will be able to figure out what you mean.