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> As a US spanish speaker, saying Catalan is another language is kind of debateable at least IMHO and gets into the interesting difference between a dialect and a language

A spaniard who doesn't speak catalan won't understand 95% of a normal convo... Catalan [0] is lexically as distant from the spanish as the Portuguese is [1]...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language

[1] https://elms.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/lexical-distance-among...

Interesting, I thought Spanish and Portuguese are extremely similar, so that a native speaker of one should understand most of the other.

Yeah, that’s a common misconception, but the reality is different. Just because they’re in the same linguistic group (Romance-derived languages) doesn’t mean they’re the same.

It’s like saying that german, dutch and english (Germanic languages) are extremely similar… =)

German and Dutch are extremely similar. As a fluent Dutch speaker without any formal German lessons whatsoever I can read German pretty well. Speaking and understanding are more difficult, but I'd say most Dutch/Germans would be able to make smalltalk in a bar if they took it slow and used a lot of hand gestures.

while English has germanic grammar, 40% of its words come from romance/french origins, so it really is a mongrel language. Word origins in english are roughly 30/30/25/15 french/latin/germanic/other, with more fancy words ('newspaper english'[1]) from romance and more daily words from germanic.

[1]https://youtu.be/2OynrY8JCDM?t=6m43s - interesting video overall

They diverged from a common language, so it's possible for a reader of one language to understand the written form of the other.

However the spoken form diverges much faster than the written form, to the point where it's completely impossible to have an oral conversation.

The pronounciation is key here: the Portuguese language "swallows" the words, which makes it difficult to follow for a Spanish speaker; on the contrary Spanish (mainly) is easy to get for a Portuguese speaker.

You were closer to being right than joeyspn. Portuguese, Spanish and Italian are more or less mutually intelligible. There's a lot of complex vocabulary and grammar that's different and plenty of simple stuff too but if you speak slowly you can communicate on day 0. French is further from mutual intelligibility but you still have an enormous leg up learning it if you speak any Western Romance language. Catalan is probably more similar to French than Spanish but it's still pretty easy for a Hispanophone to learn.

>Portuguese, Spanish and Italian are more or less mutually intelligible.

And Romanian, with only some more difficulty.

The big problems I see (as an Italian) when speaking with people from France, Spain, Portugal and Romania is mostly about the pronounciation, admittedly I have studied a little bit of French (that makes the "slightly more distant" language on par with the others).

When it is written, I can usually understand like 90% or more of most text and there are "sinergies", i.e. there is a given word that is different from Italian but is very similar to another word in another of the Latin languages or that is actually directly or almost directly a Latin word.

The issue is with "false pairs", i.e.words that exist (or sound alike or almost alike) in two languages but that have completely different meanings.

Like, to mention a couple reknown ones, "burro" which is "butter" in Italian and "donkey/ass" in Spanish or the Spanish "aceite" which most Italians will instinctively translate into "aceto" (vinegar) while it means "oil".

In my experience Brasilian Portuguese is much easier to understand and I've actually been able to have conversations with Brasilian speakers where we knew about 80-90% of what the other person was saying.

But in Europe I've been sitting on trains directly next to Portuguese speakers and had a very difficult time even understanding say 40% of what they were talking about. It was as if in Portugal they just chew up the words and chop them all up, which makes it super difficult to understand. That wasn't the case with the Brasilians I've spoken too. With them I could actually have conversations and know what they were saying.

But thats just my personal experience.

That seems like English? Anyone from any part of the English-speaking world can understand anyone else from any other part, except there are lots of people from England that none of us can understand.

There are plenty of incomprehensible Americans and Australians etc, precepts you either don't interact with them (poor people?) or you are American / Australian, and don't realise that as a Brit I can have difficult understanding a strong Boston accent.

(I think. One of the characters in "Spotlight" was the most recent time I understood almost nothing.)

Who is "us"? I'm not English, but lived there for more than 16 years. I think I understand most British regional English accents, including Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish quite well.

> Anyone from any part of the English-speaking world can understand anyone else from any other part,

Try watching an English person ask an American (in the US) for water or where the herbs are.

Yes my point was precisely that many people from England are incomprehensible.

> A spaniard who doesn't speak catalan won't understand 95% of a normal convo

I don't know if I'd go that far. I just youtubed catalan and would say I understood about 75-80% of what this guy is saying. [1]

Also, I mainly meant that statement ironically :) Catalan is its own language, its just funny to me that "dialect" is a negative term, language is not, and usually the big country with the military dictates which provinces speak a "language" and which ones are speaking a "dialect".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdiVss0X6V0&feature=youtu.be

Yeah that man speaks slowly what appears to be the variant of catalan spoken in France... I'm referring to something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-OXwRP5A9E

Spanish speakers will notice a lot of "familiar words", but most of the time it's difficult for them to extrapolate the meaning of what is being said.

I speak shit Spanish (very weak third language) and even I can get the gist of what they're talking about. I'll admit all the stuff around the rolling rs is very hard to make out though.

That kinda answered my question whether French and Spanish regions spoke the same Catalan.

You described yourself in another comment as fluent in three languages – I wonder if you might be much more practised at figuring out things spoken in other languages than others.

Well that's just patently untrue. Catalan and Spanish are as different as Spanish and French, German and Dutch, or Norwegian and Swedish. The two are further apart, lexically, than Catalan and French. They use very different perifrastic tenses, the main one would confuse the hell out of an unaware Spanish speaker (conjugate "to go" + unconjugated verb == simple past in Spanish, e.g. "vaig naixer" == "nací" == "i was born"). Not to mention spelling and pronunciation rules are drastically different ("vaig" is pronounced "vatch").

Yes by your definition I don't think true bilingualism exists.

Right now I live in a situation where I use English and a third language exclusively, and my native language has massively atrophied. If I can't even compare my native ability now with 2 years ago, how could anyone have an exactly matched ability in two languages at the same time in all possible situations and contexts?

Hence I reject your definition since it's useless. I just define true bilingualism as native-level fluency in two languages. There's enough variation in native fluency to give a healthy margin there.

Then how about Basque speakers, who almost all speak Spanish? Or Moroccans and Tunisian, whose urban educated populations usually code-switch between Arabic and French?

If Catalan is the same language as Spanish then so are Portuguese, Italian, Occitan and several more.