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From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.

I'm John McWhorter, and you know, it's time to do a language family show.

Those are always fun.

I like doing them, and you out there in the dark seem to enjoy them.

And so let's do one of those.

I think the way we're going to handle this is that I'm

always telling aspiring linguistic students or just language heads that if you want to learn your

way around languages, then really you should at least mess around with a language like Russian

and then mess around with a language like Russian and then mess around with a language like

Chinese. And what do I mean by that? Well, with Russian, you're dealing with lots and lots of

endings. You've got case endings and you've got conjugations and all the irregularity. That's

what Russian does for you. And there are lots of languages like that. Greek, Latin, you can go

further afield. You should learn a language like that. But then if you want to have a sense of

what languages are like in general, well, English is kind of in the middle, Russian is extreme

with all of that endingy stuff. Then you want to deal with a language like Chinese.

Chinese works completely differently from English or Russian or most of the languages that

were likely to learn, including even these days Japanese and Arabic Chinese, don't think.

There are many, many languages that operate like Chinese,

but the one that's easiest for a Western or two approach for various reasons would be Mandarin

...