So, why learn Ladino ~ and how hard is it. Ladino is your basic Latin with a far richer vocabulary. At the same time if you'd like to read a Medieval book in the original language, and it looks like Latin or Spanish, but not quite, that's Ladino.
Historians of the period as well as economic analysts into examining the entrails of 2000 years of just one thing after the other have to learn Ladino.
Now, Mingo ~ that one is more difficult. It's your basic non-Confederation Iroquois language ~ but, like Ladino, with a broader vocabulary.
So, you don't want to bother with it ~ but that'll keep you out of Mingo Camp where all sorts of folks go in the summer to dress and live like Iroquois!
Those Oklidokly words Homer Simpson uses? That's Mingo.
In their day the Mingo and their warrior elite were the most adanced Indians in North America.
Modern dictionaries tend to ignore both Ladino and Mingo so you get rather elaborate confabulations about what a certain word means when all you'd need to do was find a Ladino or Mingo dictionary to set the record straight. Alas, both kinds of dictionaries are difficult to lay your hands on.
Regarding the future of Chinese, Bill Gates has made sure the character language survives for eternity ~ there's a very good relationship between Windows/Office ideographs and Chinese ideographs. Most folks never notice. Then there are the more advanced "script" characters, which appear to be valid add-ons to the Chinese script character language.
It's not that English is sucking in all the others ~ rather, when it comes to Chinese languages, English has much more in common with them than the average person knows.
I once heard a lecture about Turkey (mainly about how as the Ottoman Empire shrank, many Muslims from the lost provinces resettled in Turkey). The speaker mentioned the case of Turkish consul in Chicago whose wife spoke no English. Someone who met her thought she must have a hard time there, but no—she was a Sephardic Jew and could go into the Spanish-speaking neighborhoods and converse with the storekeepers with no trouble.