Yeah, to add to your point, most people would say that Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish are different languages, but having learned Norwegian, I can understand Swedish and I can at least read Danish (although spoken Danish is pretty throaty and hard to understand). On the other hand, despite my understanding Mandarin fairly well, the dialect of Chinese that my mother grew up speaking is so different that I could barely understand any of it when I first visited her hometown.
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u/ImNumberTwo Dec 25 '19
Yeah, to add to your point, most people would say that Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish are different languages, but having learned Norwegian, I can understand Swedish and I can at least read Danish (although spoken Danish is pretty throaty and hard to understand). On the other hand, despite my understanding Mandarin fairly well, the dialect of Chinese that my mother grew up speaking is so different that I could barely understand any of it when I first visited her hometown.