How I accidentally fell into studying Romance languages
When I was studying for my SAT, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I was given a copy of a book about derivatives (the language kind, not the Calculus kind) to help prepare. It was someone's dog-eared old copy, and the front cover was missing, so I don't remember the title or author. But there was a statement in it that fascinated me, that I've always wanted to explore: it said that the evolution of language was governed by observable patterns, and that differences between modern languages that descend from the same parent are largely down to a difference in the patterns that governed their evolution.
I always wanted to explore languages and see if I could learn those patterns, but I didn't really know how to learn languages, and I never gave it much focus. In the last few years, though, Duolingo has made language learning much more accessible, and by marrying an Algerian woman I married into a French-speaking family, so that gave me an incentive to start investing some energy into learning French.
French is actually one of the easiest languages to learn for English speakers. You already speak French every day, without being aware of it. If you speak of "manual labor" you're speaking French - the Anglo-Saxon translation would be "hand work", IE, working with one's hands. Now that's not exactly as a French speaker would say it today - that phrase comes from Old French, the language spoken by the Normans who invaded England in 1066.
For a couple of hundred years after that event, there was a bifurcation of the languages spoken in England. The aristocracy, and the upper classes that were close to them, spoke French. Common people, farmers, and laborers, on the other hand, continued to speak Anglo-Saxon. Some domains, like law, were often conducted in both languages. This left an indelible mark on our language, and gives it depth. There are many such cases in English where there's a "fancy" way to say something that's probably derived from French, and a "down-to-earth" way that comes from Anglo-Saxon. If you wanted to find a term for a woman who might be comforting, have warm hands, and smell like she just cooked a meal, you might call her "motherly." If you wanted to speak of the pure form of a mother's affection for her children, though, you might choose the term "maternal." Both words mean basically the same thing, but you would tend to use them in different contexts. You might ask your friend for an answer, but you would solicit a potential employer for a reply.
Now many or most of the French words that survive in English aren't exactly the same as the ones spoken by residents of Paris today, and the ones that are the same are pronounced differently, and often have slightly different meanings (for example "adroit" in English means "deft," while "a droit" in French means "to the right"). Still, they're usually similar enough that it makes it easy to see how the French words are related to the English ones, and that makes it much easier to memorize French vocabulary.
This proved to be a gateway into an extremely casual study of Romance languages for me. I'm nowhere near fluent, but after a couple of years I got to a point where I could follow the conversations of my Algerian inlaws when they spoke French, and occasionally contribute a sentence or two without getting corrected like a child. Then I started learning Latin, and after a few months of that, I wanted to tackle Spanish. I decided to take the Spanish from French Duolingo course, because I figured that would let me learn Spanish while keeping my French sharp. Then something strange happened - one day Youtube recommended a video about Latin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1Mq6YfozwA) that was presented in Italian, a language I hadn't studied at all. I watched it on a whim, and found - to my great surprise - that I could understand quite a bit of it.
That has led me back to my original goal of wanting to study the patterns in the changes of languages. I started studying Italian a bit after that, and one thing that stuck out to me was that the Italian word for "to eat" is "mangiare" - similar to the French "manger." The Spanish word is "comere" though, similar to the Latin "comedere" - in fact I've had the impression from my cursory survey of the languages that Spanish was more conservative than the other Romance languages, was closer to Latin.
This was originally intended to be the introduction to a comparison of a handful of verbs in a few Romance languages, that I was writing as a head-clearing exercise between CS homework assignments, but it's getting long and I need to get back to my homework, so I'll post this as it stands, and come back to that verb comparison another day.