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Perhaps because I have already got some basic Italian vocabulary from listening so much to operas, it's sometimes been far easier for me to understand spoken Standard Italian than spoken Spanish, particularly because Spanish speakers tend to use too much lenition in their consonants almost to the point of making them drop entirely, and they speak way too fast for the standards of an average Brazilian Portuguese speaker (pretty much the same issue we have with European Portuguese speakers, who are very easily understood by us if only they decide to speak less incredibly fast and with a clearer enunciation than they usually do).
Italian and Brazilian Portuguese are both more phonologically conservative - compare e.g. "jewel" Italian [dʒɔjɛlːː o], Portuguese [ʒɔjɐ] vs. Spanish [xodʒa, xoʒa, xoʝa, xoʃa] -, consonants are pronounced in a firm and clear way with no phonetic lenition, and in my experience Italians tend to speak in a more carefully articulated and less hurried way than Spanish speakers.
Were it not for that, I'd say we Portuguese speakers could understand perhaps 85-90% of any spoken Spanish video or audio without any exposure to Spanish lexicon and grammar, and in fact sometimes we do when it's a more formal or solemn occasion, and people are made to speak with a higher self-awareness about their own speech.
I'm not sure the opposite is true, though. Perhaps because of the complex phonology of nasal vowels, semivowels and diphthongs in Portuguese, in my experience Spanish speakers have a lot more trouble understanding us.
In Chile I had to explain what I wanted several times before I could get a salesman to understand that banheiro (Brazilian Portuguese for restroom) is the same thing as baño (as they usually say in Chile for casa de baño), even though the two words are obviously closely related. I thought that could've been caused by our way of pronouncing banheiro, which is not [baɲejɾo] as some Spanish speaker might expect, but [bɐ̃j̃ejɾu].
Perhaps because I have already got some basic Italian vocabulary from listening so much to operas, it's sometimes been far easier for me to understand spoken Standard Italian than spoken Spanish, particularly because Spanish speakers tend to use too much lenition in their consonants almost to the point of making them drop entirely, and they speak way too fast for the standards of an average Brazilian Portuguese speaker (pretty much the same issue we have with European Portuguese speakers, who are very easily understood by us if only they decide to speak less incredibly fast and with a clearer enunciation than they usually do).
Italian and Brazilian Portuguese are both more phonologically conservative - compare e.g. "jewel" Italian [dʒɔjɛlːː o], Portuguese [ʒɔjɐ] vs. Spanish [xodʒa, xoʒa, xoʝa, xoʃa] -, consonants are pronounced in a firm and clear way with no phonetic lenition, and in my experience Italians tend to speak in a more carefully articulated and less hurried way than Spanish speakers.
Were it not for that, I'd say we Portuguese speakers could understand perhaps 85-90% of any spoken Spanish video or audio without any exposure to Spanish lexicon and grammar, and in fact sometimes we do when it's a more formal or solemn occasion, and people are made to speak with a higher self-awareness about their own speech.
I'm not sure the opposite is true, though. Perhaps because of the complex phonology of nasal vowels, semivowels and diphthongs in Portuguese, in my experience Spanish speakers have a lot more trouble understanding us.
In Chile I had to explain what I wanted several times before I could get a salesman to understand that banheiro (Brazilian Portuguese for restroom) is the same thing as baño (as they usually say in Chile for casa de baño), even though the two words are obviously closely related. I thought that could've been caused by our way of pronouncing banheiro, which is not [baɲejɾo] as some Spanish speaker might expect, but [bɐ̃j̃ejɾu].
I did study Spanish in high school, so it's hard for me to judge as far as Spanish is concerned. However, when I spent a summer semester in Barcelona, some Catalans adamantly spoke only Catalan. If I spoke slowly they could understand me and I could understand them. As Duarte pointed out, an occasional word would have to be explained in a sentence.
As for Portuguese, I had a wonderful Portuguese nanny for a couple of years. She became like a dear friend to me and remains so. Again, I spoke in Italian to her and she spoke Portuguese to me, and we got along just fine. My friends were often quite amused to hear my son jabbering away in Portuguese. Unfortunately, he's lost most of it.![]()
It may be my imagination, but I thought perhaps my ease with both Catalan and Portuguese had something to do with the fact that I grew up hearing the Ligurian dialect. It's closer, imo, to these languages than is "standard" Italian, i.e. Tuscan. Or maybe it's just that since the "core" of the word is usually what is spoken in those dialects, I recognize it in other languages.
Or perhaps it's as one of the people on the video said: for some reason Italian speakers can understand other Romance languages better than they can understand us.
As for French, I found written french very easy. (I read somewhere we have more cognates with French than other romance languages.) Pronunciation was a little harder.
Then, I think there's a difference person to person. Some people just can make the "leap" from language to language faster than others.
Maybe you could try seeing how this sounds to you...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1RaZx8qbLc
And this...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJqHV-lo0oE
Brazilian Portuguese X European Portuguese
Strange. The Brazilian Portuguese words are closer to ours most of the time I think.
I did study Spanish in high school, so it's hard for me to judge as far as Spanish is concerned. However, when I spent a summer semester in Barcelona, some Catalans adamantly spoke only Catalan. If I spoke slowly they could understand me and I could understand them. As Duarte pointed out, an occasional word would have to be explained in a sentence.
As for Portuguese, I had a wonderful Portuguese nanny for a couple of years. She became like a dear friend to me and remains so. Again, I spoke in Italian to her and she spoke Portuguese to me, and we got along just fine. My friends were often quite amused to hear my son jabbering away in Portuguese. Unfortunately, he's lost most of it.![]()
It may be my imagination, but I thought perhaps my ease with both Catalan and Portuguese had something to do with the fact that I grew up hearing the Ligurian dialect. It's closer, imo, to these languages than is "standard" Italian, i.e. Tuscan. Or maybe it's just that since the "core" of the word is usually what is spoken in those dialects, I recognize it in other languages.
Or perhaps it's as one of the people on the video said: for some reason Italian speakers can understand other Romance languages better than they can understand us.
As for French, I found written french very easy. (I read somewhere we have more cognates with French than other romance languages.) Pronunciation was a little harder.
Then, I think there's a difference person to person. Some people just can make the "leap" from language to language faster than others.
Maybe you could try seeing how this sounds to you...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1RaZx8qbLc
And this...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJqHV-lo0oE
Many linguists say that Brazilian Portuguese remained close to the Portuguese brought by Portuguese colonizers in the 16th and 17th centuries, both in cadence and as in the use of words considered archaic in European Portuguese. The justification would be a later influence of French in European Portuguese, a fact that did not occur in the colony.
I actually think the phonology of Ligurian (what little snippet of it that I have heard, let me clarify) resembles that of Catalan and perhaps a bit less so that of European Portuguese, indeed.
I couldn't understand the dialect in the video any better than standard Tuscan Italian, but I couldn't help noticing that the sounds are much closer to Catalan, Occitan and even a bit of French than any standard Italian that I have heard. I think that could facilitate understanding people speaking in Catalan and perhaps even in French, indeed.
Of all the most spoken Romance languages, I have only very serious trouble understanding Romanian (due to phonetic divergence as well as non-Romance lexicon) and French (because it's just too insane in the way it evolved phonetically, so that I find it reasonably easy to understand written French, but spoken, especially casual French sometimes sounds like it could be Danish or Russian to me and it wouldn't be far less intelligible, lol; they also have a "problem" with that very fast pace of speech that I talked above in my other answer).
In fact, Occitan and Ligurian are both spoken in Monaco and in some parts of Italy. Geographically, it makes all the sense in the world. Now, Catalonia is more spread towards the south, but the Catalan origin is in the north of the Pyrenees (the current France). Only with the Muret battle, which Catalans lost, Catalonia changed course and moved southwards. But until then, Occitaine and Catalonia were linked together. I imagine that people in the current south of France, Catalonia and Western Italy were speaking the same language, basically.
Woman speaking Occitan...
It definitely sounds like the western "Gallo-Italian" languages, and I could understand a lot of it.
She definitely looks like us too.
Woman speaking Occitan...
It definitely sounds like the western "Gallo-Italian" languages, and I could understand a lot of it.
She definitely looks like us too.
Occitan is (was!) spoken throughout a big area. Occitan, then, consists of a series of almost unintelligible dialects (what is a dialect and what is a language is just a political decision: look at the "dialects" of German).
I think this woman must come from the border between France and Italy (Provence? Val d'Aosta?), since she uses French words, very clearly, and some Italian. As a Catalan speaker, I cannot understand her at all.
Instead, look at the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-5e_gOe00U
As a Catalan, I can understand most of it. This Occitan (the Langedocian one, in the French border with Catalonia) is, in my opinion, some kind of old Catalan.
There is an ongoing discussion to consider Occitan and Catalan as parts of the same language. Clearly, politics is against this (irrespective of the intellectual merits of the idea).
Occitan is (was!) spoken throughout a big area. Occitan, then, consists of a series of almost unintelligible dialects (what is a dialect and what is a language is just a political decision: look at the "dialects" of German).
I think this woman must come from the border between France and Italy (Provence? Val d'Aosta?), since she uses French words, very clearly, and some Italian. As a Catalan speaker, I cannot understand her at all.
Instead, look at the video:
As a Catalan speaker, I cannot understand her at all.
.
She is from the Aubrac region, north of Mende (département of Lozère).Her dialect is close to Auvergnat, though a tinge "southern-shifted". She is certainly intelligible to me.
That said, she is clearly a zealous learner, and did hear a lot of local dialect spoken in her early days, but she obviously never used the dialect as a first language. She drops French words here and there, when local words do exist, and the phonology is on occasion at best an acceptable approximation. She herself quite honestly admits she's no more than a passionate amateur.
The Occitan dialects were exactly what we call a dialect continuum, from Provençal in the east to Béarnais in the west, linking, somehow, Italian dialects to Spanish ones, with both an east-west gradient and a north-south gradient, both gradients combined making mutual intelligibility increasingly difficult with distance.
That said, in my grandparents' Auvergnat dialect, the days of the week (except for Sunday), for example, were extremely close to their Catalan cognates : /djiljü/ /djimar/ /djimekr/ /djidzeù/ /djiveñdr/ /djisat/
I read Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan and Italian without (much) difficulty. I understand the gist of a conversation in spoken Catalan, Italian, and, to a lesser degree, in Portuguese. I understand virtullay nothing in spoken Spanish.
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