It's really the perfect language to pick up on a visit even ... except the vocabulary doesn't resemble anything that most of the rest of the world speaks. There's lots of loanwords from farsi, arabic, french and english of course but beyond that and speakers of other Turkic languages, it's struggle for most people.
But yes, it's true that we're often over the moon that someone put in the effort to speak it :-)
But it is often the case that geographically close languages influence each other -- the term in linguistics is "sprachbund". If one is entirely honest, a lot of languages have taken vocabulary or grammatical features from one or more languages from other language families, rendering the entire idea of a language "family" (the word is here evoked to imply a pure genetic lineage) kind of suspect to begin with. But it still is how linguistics is commonly done today.
The "error tolerance" you mention is interesting, especially in contrast with Mandarin. My understanding is that messing up the intonation there can completely alter the meaning of words, leading to trope situations where the foreigner says something embarrassing and all the native speakers laugh.
On the other hand - during ~500 years (within last ~625 years) that Ottomans occupied most of Balkans - many words stuck around to this day.
For example: Jok, Jorgan, Džezva, Mašala ...etc
Hah, of course wiki has a pretty good list with even more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Serbo-Croatian_words_o...
:-)
Whereas in German speaking countries I only had any issues in reaching out to technicians for house repairs.
However if we insist learning French and German, regardless how bad it might feel like during initial efforts, eventually it will improve good enough to work on those languages.
In my experience in the Netherlands you should definitely just start speaking English to people, as asking someone if they speak English is a bit like asking if they can read
Knowing the language will definitely help people fit in better as many conversations amongst the Dutch will still be in Dutch and also most signage and other written texts will obviously also be in Dutch.
Conversely, I went into a small shop, tried my broken French, and asked the shopkeeper if he spoke English after a failed attempt at making him understand me. He didn't, but dragged me into the street and started stopping random people until he found someone who could help translate.
While purely anecdotal, those extremes seem fairly common even today, and frankly I get it - it'd annoy me to if people don't even make a perfunctory attempt. Of course the stereotype of certain types of tourists doesn't help.
Apart from that, I think people in general are far more likely to feel ok about trying to express themselves in your language if you've made a fool of yourself in their language first...
I guess I got lucky in France then because they felt so sorry for me after my attempts at french they would reply in english
I've had situations in France where I ended up having one side of the conversation in French and one in English!
I live in Germany and I always start conversations in German, but if it becomes clear that their English is much better than my German, I switch to English to spare them of the burden. It's not the barista's job to indulge me in my learning pursuits :)
This is actually an effective way for two people to practise each others' language, and is adjustable according to aptitudes:
Easy mode: each person speaks their own L1
Hard mode: each person speaks the other's L1
I'm considering learning either Turkish or Arabic, for fun (as phonetically-spelled non-Indoeuropean languages), do you have a comparison with Arabic? I know exactly what you mean re French and German...
Turkish is also mutually intelligible with Uzbek and Kazakh - it's basically like English and Dutch.
Edit:- Learning Chagatai practically let's you speak Kazakh and Uzbek partway. Tried it in both countries, might work in other places like Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan too. :)
The Indo-European languages and the Afro-Asiatic, including the Semitic languages like Arabic, are distinguished from most languages of the world by having much more irregular grammars, of the kind that was traditionally named "inflected".
Amazingly, while the more irregular grammars of the "inflected" languages are better seen as a bug and not as a feature, in the past the European scholars believed that such grammars are a sign of superiority of the Indo-European and Semitic languages, even if it is much easier to argue in favor of an opposite point of view.
In conclusion, I believe that for a speaker of European languages it is much easier to learn Turkish, due to easier pronunciation and more regular grammar.
Nevertheless, when there is no special reason for learning either of the languages, Modern Standard Arabic or Classical Arabic are more interesting languages from a historical point of view, enabling the understanding of many facts about the old Arabic literature or pertaining to the related Semitic languages that have been very important in the Ancient World or about the origins of the Greek and Latin alphabets (Standard Arabic has a conservative phonology and it still distinguishes most of the sounds for which the oldest Semitic alphabet has been created, which has later evolved into the simplified Phoenician alphabet, from which the Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew alphabets have been derived).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fmNl4gcufBU&pp=ygU0RXNraSBrYXl...
It was really nice to not have to mess with too much of a case system, after Russian.
I currently learn Spanish, and I'm always amused by how regular everything is.
In German, words constantly get split up and change positions in the sentences when you say something slightly different.
Du sprichst Deutsch.
Sprichst du Deutsch?
Vs
Hablas Español.
¿Hablas Español?
Also, most Germans don't like speaking German with people who don't speak it well. Probably, because subtle errors can change the whole meaning.
For most Germans it's easier to speak English with foreigners who speak better English than German.
Tu parles français
Tu parles français ?
Parles-tu français ?
Est-ce-que tu parles français ?
I guess it's the best of both worlds.
The French like to hear foreigners speak French though, they're just terrible at understanding accents they don't hear often and terrible at adjusting their speech so the other person understands them. And too self conscious about their English accent to speak English.
Don't know where this prejudice comes from.