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 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.

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 ending 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

we're likely to learn including even these days Japanese and Arabic Chinese is don't

think.

There are many languages that operate like Chinese but the one that's easiest for a

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