On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 Bato001 at aol.com wrote: > French, Italian, Portugese and Spanish are similar enough that you can > at least get by if you speak one of them. In my experience one has to speak the language in question really really well for this to work because it relies on overlaps of unusual vocab. My luck pretending Dutch is German or Italian is French or Spanish is Italian has been pretty crummy. Anyway, everybody in the world ought to speak English. It's an easy, flexible language with a great children's literature.