Since I'm very interested in languages, I'm often surprised at how difficult other players sometimes find it to be to recognize specific languages (e.g. the differences between Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French, and Italian are quite obvious to me, but often not to many other players).
But I also notice that there are many, many world languages that I can't recognize easily; for Geogussr purposes in particular the most relevant for me right now are the Slavic languages (I can tell Polish apart from the others written in Latin script, but have trouble distinguishing the others that are written in that script; I have trouble distinguishing the Slavic languages that are written in Cyrillic; and I also have trouble distinguishing the Central Asian languages that are written in Cyrillic that are not from the Slavic family).
Wikipedia has a great chart to help you recognize languages even without learning to speak or understand them
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Language_recognition...
and I'm currently writing a language recognition trainer (which, when it's done, will give you a sample of text and ask you to guess what language it is, and, if you get it wrong, provide some kind of tips that could help you to recognize that language). I plan to make it available to the public when I'm finished. I'd love for the ability to recognize and distinguish languages from one another to become more widespread. Because of the ubiquity and importance of English, we native English speakers are said to be especially bad at this... not just at understanding other languages, but even at telling them apart!
That would be awesome as an interactive flowchart
I doubt I would ever think of language recognition this way, but I bet those flowcharts do include individual tricks that people (like avid Geoguessr players) could choose to learn pretty easily.
I mean, I guess a fact like "Łł is in Polish and no other national language" feels OK to me but I personally feel better about learning other kinds of features when at all possible (individual words, morphemes, n-grams?). Although I don't plan for my own trainer software to force users to learn any particular kind of tips rather than others; I'm hoping to have it generate several kinds of recognition tips that might appeal to different people.
For example, I like knowing (and would like to teach people) that the English suffix -tion corresponds (regularly!) to
* Latin -tio [accusative form "-tionem" often cited in etymology] * French -tion * Spanish -ción * Portuguese -ção * Catalan -ció * Italian -zione
like: nation, natio, nation, nación, nação, nació, nazione
But I could imagine that some people would say "I'm going to focus on how Portuguese and French have ç and these other languages don't, and Portuguese has ã and these other languages don't, and only Spanish and Catalan can have -ó, and Italian words almost always end with vowels and Catalan words commonly end with consonants" without learning the individual endings. And I hope I'll get my trainer into shape to help them learn that too, if they want to think about it that way.