The funny thing is that partially we can. It’s the funniest shit to watch a group of Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian people. Kind of like watching an English speaker somewhat understanding Dutch.
Kind of like watching an English speaker somewhat understanding Dutch.
Yeah but you can’t really understand them it just sort of sounds like you should be able to and you’re not hearing them properly. You have no idea what they’re actually saying.
The ebb and flow of the languages are almost identical, but the words are completely different.
My thoughts exactly, if I’m hearing someone speak French then my brain says “that’s a different language”, but Dutch sounds similar enough to English that my brain says “that’s gobbledygook, there’s trickery afoot!”
Probably more like a German and Dutch speaker. I speak fluent English and fluent German (to like an 8 year-olds standard), I can sort of understand Dutch.
Same with the Scandinavian languages. You can mostly figure out what they’re talking about, but some words are just gibberish. I had two Danish girls try to hit on me at a bar here in Sweden many years ago, the only thing I understood was that they found me attractive because I look like Bob Dylan and they are fans of him. Danish is especially hard, IMO, even more so when it’s spoken by drunk people.
I just picture it in my mother’s talk about how ladies should keep their legs closed … like “Now, Seven, you’re getting to that age when older men start taking an interest in you, and you don’t want to come down with a case of Slagboom, what would the neighbours think?!”
As a Romanian I can understand a lot of Italian and Spanish, but I really can’t understand how Portuguese is related to these languages. I can’t understand a single word. (French is different too, but I’ve heard it enough to pick up on it). On the other hand, my wife just naturally understands all romance languages, including Portuguese, so maybe it’s just me.
How odd. I can speak a bit of Spanish. I used to be able to hold casual conversations (after a few drinks) but was nowhere near fluent. I was able to understand just a bit of Portuguese such that I was able to watch some Brazilian shows on Netflix and get the gist of about every third sentence.
I’ve been told that Portuguese speakers can understand Spanish pretty well, but that the reverse isn’t always true, and that both can muddle by in Italian with short phrases. French, on the other hand, is a whole different animal for me.
Portuguese from Portugal and from Brazil are extremely similar languages but not from a phonetic POV. Portuguese people sound like Russian people where as Brazilian people sound more like Italian people if that makes any sense.
That being said I very much disagree with the initial comment. Portuguese people will understand Spanish people somewhat well (depending on their age and education) but Italian and French is a bit of a stretch and it definitely isn’t the other way around. My theory for the main reason is that in Portugal almost no TV Shows are dubbed except the ones for kids and even then not always (I’m Portuguese and I watched many cartoons in Spanish on TV). This isn’t the case in the other European countries so they don’t really get used to hearing other languages often.
When I went to Brazil, I met a girl and we would communicate like that. I would speak Spanish, and she would respond in Portuguese. We understood each other fairly well. I then became enamored with Portuguese. It’s such a beautiful language to me.
This isn’t a dumb question. What she’s asking about is known as Mutual Intelligibility or Linguistic Distance, depending on how you read it.
Languages in the same family tend to score well, such as the three Romance languages she listed. Estimates of French <-> Italian are often in the 80% range. That doesn’t mean you can speak the other language, but in a bind an average Italian may be able to catch about 80% of what a French person is trying to convey.
Yes, we can generally understand each other. When my American cousins visit my other cousins in northern Italy, they of course speak English if the Italians know English or Italian if the Americans know Italian, but when some members don’t share a common language, they often make a fair conversation with the Americans speaking Spanish and the Italians speaking Italian. They both slow down and try to simplify their vocabulary, but you can generally converse pretty fairly with context clues.
This is just mean, judging someone who wasn’t taught the nuances differentiating language from dialect.
There’s 100%, a partial understanding among romance languages. I’ve communicated with humans in real life bc of this understanding.
And she’s clearly intellectually curious and open to learning by asking this online. So we should feel bad that the education system failed this fantastic woman.
Low effort. Downvote. Borderline victim blaming. This isn’t Reddit. Don’t pick on people.
I used to think I could understand spanish too. Then I made a road trip through Argentina and realized that that couldn’t be further from the truth, lol.
My wife is a damn yankee. Moved from up there in forn parts down here to the real america, where we speak proper english.
Anyway, she’s been down here a little over ten years. She still runs into situations where she has to ask me “what did he say?” when we go to a family getogether. Like, my cousin might say something that means, “yeah, I was in the woods hunting and saw a bear”, but it comes out “I’uz downta the woods ahuntin, and saw a bar”. She hears something more like “izadunta tha woods ahntin n sawabar”. So, she knows he was in the woods, and was doing something and saw something. But she has no idea what he was doing, or what he saw.
Meanwhile, she’s being asked to slow down and relax because everything she says is clipped and a little too fast to keep up with by my more rural family.
Watching her and my great uncle talk is fucking hilarious because there’s just this string of gibberish as far as they’re both concerned, so they just laugh and essentially say they have no idea what was just said, but that’s okay.
Then again, I barely understand my great uncle some days. He’s from here in the Appalachians originally, but moved to Alabama to run the farm his wife’s family has. As an example of how he sounds, when there’s dogs that need to be run off, he has this thing he yells.
It sounds like gehownupouttahyuh. Which is broken down into geh own up outta hyuh, which translates to get on up outta here. But it’s one long fucking word for him. Which is how he always talks. It’s normally just slower than his dog shooing. If he wants you to know he’s going shopping, he says something akin to “ahmagwondownt’thestow” no breaks between words unless it’s where a t is a stop, but it’s draaawwwwled every vowel is stretched like taffy until it sticks to everything
I grew up bilingual with English and Spanish. I learned French in school for like 5 years and became fluent in it at the time. I can pretty much understand Italian. And with some effort, I can kind of understand Portuguese. However, I’m intrigued that I understand Italian better than Portuguese considering that Portugal and Spain share the Iberian Peninsula while there is a country between Spain and Italy. Also, it’s interesting to me that despite taking 5 years of French and never taking Italian classes, I still understand Italian better than French.
I feel like it depends a lot to who, in Italy, you are talking to. There are very heavy accent from north to south and a lot of dialects influences all over Italy.
Yeah as a french who knows 0 Italian (and the tiniest bit of Latin) I can somewhat easily understand written Italian, but when it’s actually spoken it’s an entirely different story
I get the jist of it. With context and congnates and some basic linguistics I can understand what is being said. I feel like I can also read it to a certain degree. If you are a native English speaker and want to feel what’s it’s like look up someone speaking “Scots” is a sister language to English and probably the closest to English without also being English.
For those curious, here’s an excerpt from Welsh’s Acid House story “A Blockage in the System”
Knoxie wis hoverin in the doorway; ehs face set in that kind ay expression thit cries out fir our attention, whin eh kens thit every cunt’ll ignore um until eh speaks. Then will git some bullshit about how eh’d telt Manderson tae stick ehs fuckin joab up ehs erse whin the truth is thit the cunt’s shat ehs fuckin keks again.
— That cunt Manderson, eh wheezed.
— Trouble at mill? ah asked, no lookin up fae ma cairds. This wis a shite hand. Ah turned tae gie ma foreman ma undivided attention, as a conscientious employee. A null n void declaration by Knoxie here wid suit ays doon tae a fuckin tee, the shite ah’m hudin.
— Wuv goat tae jildy. Thir’s fuckin chaos doon at the flats.
— Hud oan the now, Lozy sais nervously. Obviously this wide-o’s goat the maist tae lose.
Pickin up ehs anxiety, Calum flings ehs hand in. Ah follay suit.
Italian and Spanish are somewhat similar. Though not as similar as Spanish and Portuguese. I know Mexican and Brazilian people all over where I live that can communicate with each other in their own language and they’re close enough to understand each other. I’m not sure if that’s the case with Italian, though.
I’m decently fluent in Spanish and Portuguese might as well be Arabic to me. The pronunciation is wildly different. Which is crazy because I can actually understand written Portuguese pretty well. Then it’s like, “Wait…how did you get those sounds from those words??”
As an native Italianbsoeaker, Spanish (castellano) is okay tondeal with, sounds like an Italian dialect. I spent six months in south America years ago and i just picked it up. Spain-spanish is harder but mostly because of the way they speak it.
French there is no way. The two languages are similar, we share a vast amount of words and grammar rules but there is no way without some level of formal education that you’d understand or speak it.
As someone living in Australia, I’d love the cunt who posted this to come over and be exposed to some proper aussie lingo - assuming she’s a Brit or a seppo, she might be surprised about how much she can’t understand.
I just want to correct a minor thing. Español castellano is actually spaniard Spanish. The name originates from from castile iirc but it’s mostly from the central and northern parts of Spain. As far as I’m aware we’ve always just called Spanish in Mexico, Mexican Spanish when in context to these sort of conversations.
As a native Spanish speaker I’ve always found portugués, Italiano, and French to a lesser extent easier to understand. Especially in the written form. Some Portugués dialects particularly I can fairly easily understand the spoken form of.
Noted about castellano and it makes sense. It was a long time ago but I remember in the countries I visited (Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia mostly) people calling it castellano not sure why but my assumption was that “spanish” was carrying colonial connotations? So I got used to do the same!
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