I still have my Eee 901 sitting around with my collection of old tech. It actually booted up a couple years ago when I last checked it! Used the crap out of it back in college for computer science classes, since all I really needed was a terminal.
Their writing systems have their own cool histories. Japanese technically has 4 writing systems (kinda 5 if you count the original purely chinese-character based system). Korean used to have Hanja, a Chinese based system, but then some emperor just decided “nope, this sucks, I’m making a new thing”, and came up with hangul. Imo hangul is one of the coolest systems out there.
Baltic languages are awesome. I only wish I could master those case systems!
Chinese did influence a lot of east Asian languages, but it’s more like the relationship between Latin and English - lots of borrowing and influence, but it’s not an ancestor.
Linguistics. Did you know English and Bengali are related? They share an ancestor about 5000 years ago. Russian, Latin, Farsi, and Greek, and lots more are in that family too.
Do you know what languages are not related at all, absolutely 0% aside from borrowings, even though if you know a bit about em they seem like they should be? Japanese and Korean.
This concept actually makes me want to have AI take my job