Hi,
That’s a really good question, almost every speller wrestles with it sooner or later. Although there’s no set formula for an order of study, a good place to start is by looking at the odds of getting a particular language at the national spelling bee. According to Scott Remer in his book “Words of Wisdom,” (which I recommend highly), here are the languages of origin ranked according to percentage of words in the Scripps National Spelling Bee:
Language
|
%
|
Latin
|
27
|
Greek
|
21
|
French
|
16
|
Middle English
|
10
|
German
|
5
|
Italian
|
4
|
Spanish
|
3
|
Russian
|
2
|
Persian/Hindi/Urdu
|
2
|
Japanese
|
2
|
Arabic
|
1.69
|
Portuguese
|
1
|
Dutch
|
1
|
Afrikaans
|
1
|
Sanskrit
|
1
|
Yiddish
|
0.5
|
Hebrew
|
0.5
|
Turkish
|
0.4
|
Hungarian
|
0.26
|
Chinese
|
0.26
|
Malay
|
0.26
|
Samoan/Tahitian
|
0.26
|
Norwegian
|
0.13
|
Swedish
|
0.13
|
Gaelic
|
0.13
|
Welsh
|
0.13
|
Polish
|
0.13
|
Finnish
|
0.13
|
Tagalog
|
0.13
|
Hawaiian
|
0.13
|
Egyptian
|
0.13
|
Note that the first four make up the majority of words; I would suggest starting there, and then allocating appropriate study hours to the remaining languages.
Another thing to consider is studying roots: take a look at Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of Prefixes, Suffixes, and Combining Forms: I would rate that as important as any of the languages listed above.
Hope this helps!
-Christal Schermeister