Does anybody else get really fascinated by closely related or mutually intelligible languages and find it hard to learn one without looking at the other(s)?

This isn't really a thing for English (obviously), or Hebrew (though Arabic and Aramaic are related), but I've experienced it with most other languages I've tried learning.

It's fun and awesome, but I find that I never get far enough with any one language and mix dialects/languages all the time :-\

Arabic:

I was always exposed to Lebanese with friends in childhood, but I couldn't help but learn a bit of Egyptian...and then branch out to Khaleeji, Iraqi etc. I just found it so interesting analysing all the similarities and differences and seeing how far I could go.

Spanish:

I had more focus with this, but I still found myself branching out to Italian and French.

Hindi:

Kept trying to learn bits and pieces of Punjabi.

Turkish:

Uzbek, Uyghur and Kazakh kept pulling me in.

Russian:

This is my current issue - I just can't stop comparing things with Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Slovak and Czech. It's really distracting me - especially the Polish and Ukrainian.

I know this may sound weird or stupid, and realise that eventually I'll have to acknowledge that I need to focus on one more than the others.

But I think that coming from the linguistic background I'm from, the idea that you can learn one language and communicate with a speaker of another language has always seemed so cool and foreign to me. I find that the more Russian (for example) I learn, the more I want to see how similar or different Polish is, and learn the equivalent forms in Polish.

It's almost like I want to see how many different languages I can understand by just learning one or two.

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