Starting a language “from scratch” is essentially impossible because of the vast amount of word you know already through cognates Cognates are “true friends” of words you recognize from your native language that mean the same thing in another language
Romance languages like French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and others have many words in common with English. English initially “borrowed them” from the Norman conquest of England, which lasted several hundreds of years.
Examples include; Action, nation, precipitation, solution, frustration, tradition, communication, extinction (-tion words) are spelled exactly the same in French, and you can quickly get used to the different pronunciation. Change that -tion to a -ción and you have the same words in Spanish. Italian is -zione and Portu-guese is -ção.
Many languages also have words that share a common (Greek/Latin or other) root, which can be spelled slightly differently, but that you’d have to try hard not to recognize, such as exemple, hélicoptère (France), porto, capitano (Ital-ian) astronomía, and Saturno (Spanish). German goes a step further and has many words from English’s past that it shares.
To find common words with the language you are learning, simply search for “[language name] cognates” or “[lan-guage name] English loan words” to see words they borrowed from us, and finally “[language name] words in En-glish” to see words we borrowed from them.That’s all well and good for European languages, but what about more distant ones?...Well, it turns out that even languages as different as Japanese can have heaps of very familiar vocabulary. To show you what I mean, have a listen to this song (to the tune of Animaniac’s “Nations of the World”), which is sungentirely in Japanese, and yet you should understand pretty much everything that I and the other Japanese learners are singing:
Many languages simply borrow English words and integrate them into the new language with altered pronunciation or stress so as to make my life easy when I start learning a language, one of the first word lists I try to consume is a list of, “cognates,” or “English loan words,” which can be found quickly for pretty much any language
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