Do You Speak A Second Language?

Yeah, but my wife - who studied German for several years - definitely noticed the similarities, and it has made things easier on her.

Well in that case...

I haven't been working on Japanese lately, since I returned from Japan. I'm still roughly where I was a couple of months ago. I'm going to Tokyo again in January so I'll pick up again in the next month or so.

I looked at the Japanese for dummies book but it's just romani apparently! That is not what I want.

romaji, duh.

I've got a couple Vlax Romani books you can borrow if you decide to take a radically different tack!

I've spent the last week on Italian in Duolingo and I think I want to commit to it as my third language. I only know the basics right now, but I'm trying to plunge in and puzzle through Italian news articles and opera libretti (also watching a Zelda Let's Play). There's enough lexical similarity with French that I can often pick up the gist of what's being said.

This is a fun reference page if you have one Romance language under your belt and are considering another one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity

If you trust these numbers (data comes from Ethnologue/SLI International, who are problematic but probably OK with Romance languages info) JMM chose Italian wisely... it and French have the highest lexical similarity of all Romance language pairs! Well, tied with Spanish/Portuguese actually.