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Comment by p1esk | Hacker News Reader

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

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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".

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

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.

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.

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.

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