Starting with the Everyman English

[cbat007]

If you have everyman skill English 4 points, How many points would it take to know every other language in the book?

has anyone calculated this useing the "Similar language table"? if not ill post the cost when i get time to calculate

Thanks again.

[Amorkca]

Its likely cheaper to have Universal translator, instead

[dmjalund]

even if Universal translator is off the table, you could still save a lot by buying Linguist 

[Tjack]

   Also how well do you want to be able to speak the language?  For a character I thought should be a world traveler i had a pretty expensive list going, until I realized that there were some reasonable limitations.
   Languages like Cantonese, Mandarin or Farsi might be fluently spoken without being able to be read them or spoken with accents good enough to fool native speakers.
    If you can speak, read and write English you should have no problem and thereby no cost to reading and writing Spanish or French, as long as you paid to speak them.

[unclevlad]

On 10/10/2020 at 6:58 PM, Amorkca said:

Its likely cheaper to have Universal translator, instead

 

It might be in APG, but pretty sure there's an explicit statement that UT isn't intended to be a surrogate for "I know every language there is."

 

If you go by HD, the problem is there's something over *600* separate languages.  There are, I think, a couple dozen Native American and Eskimo languages;  I'm not sure what their similarities are.  Probably a similar number of African languages;  I've never had a character concept that connected with them, tho, so I'm not sure.  Heck, there are 70 languages shown in the similarity chart on 6E1 81.

 

If you went fluent conversation, tho, and with Linguist...it actually wouldn't be terribly expensive.  It's a little awkward to work out, tho, because the of the different similarity groups, and the rules are...let's say, finicky, with some of em, particularly orange-box.  For an orange-box group, where you get 1/2 similarity, you want one language at idiomatic.  The blue and green groups, it's "pick one" for full cost, the rest would be at -1.

 

HD makes this a bit tricky, in that it's order-dependent, so you don't get the price break on all the languages in any given box.

[unclevlad]

Let's see....

 

For this purpose there is no difference between green and blue similarities;  each gives a 1 point cost reduction.  Red only and standalone give no break.  For definiteness, I'm gonna go with Completely Fluent, unless the full Idiomatic works out better...it will in the orange similarities.  Also, Linguist is a given here.

 

There are 16 red-only or no-similarity...Armenian, Albanian, Greek, Turkish, Mongol, Basque, Georgian, Japanese, Korean, Swahili, Berber, Hausa, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Tagalog, and Telugu.  (I'm skipping Ancient Mayan and the Native languages for now.)  2 points each, so 32 points.

 

There are 9 simple blue-green only combos.  Picking the top-most language of each:  Latvian, Gaelic, Hindustani, Byelorussian, Italian, Persian, Mandarin, Burmese, and Malayalam.  They cover 36 languages, so the price would be 9 * 2 + 27 * 1, or 41 points.

 

The Scandinavians:  one costs 3 points for Idiomatic;  the other 2 get Comp Fluency for 0.

The Romance group:  Spanish gets Idiomatic, giving Catalan and Portuguese at CF for 0.  French gets CF for 1, which means Latin gets CF for 1.  So that's 5 points.

The Germanics:  Let's put English as native.  We want German and Dutch at Idiomatic, that'll be 2 each.  Then Yiddish and Afrikaans at CF will be 0.  4 points.

Estonian:  Idiomatic, 3 points.  Finnish gets CF for 0, Hungarian gets it for 1.  4 points.

Similarly, 5 points for Indonesian (idiom), Malay, Javanese, and Sundanese (CF).

 

So a total of 94 points.

 

Note that if you go with Fluent Conversation for all the no-similarity and blue-green, you save 52 points.  You can take French, Latin, Hungarian, Javanese, and Sundanese to FC to save another 5.  So if you mostly just want fluent conversation, with actually a pretty darn good assortment of idiomatic (7) and CF (8 very closely related), it's 37 points.

 

EDIT:  OOPS!!!   Not 37...40.  Forgot the 3 points for Linguist.