CAN A NATIVE SPANISH SPEAKER REALLY UNDERSTAND PORTUGUESE AND VICE-VERSA?
I am a lanuage student, study French, Italian, as well as German (English is my local language) as well as we know that since of Italian as well as French, we can assimilate a satisfactory volume of Spanish, as well as we devise to sense it inside of a subsequent couple of years. However, we only watched City of God (Cidado de Deus) that takes place in Brazil, as well as whilst we could collect out multiform difference here as well as there in Portuguese, we couldn’t assimilate a lot of it. How do local Spanish/Portuguese speakers satisfactory with bargain a two? Thanks, Curious Language student
Tagged with: Native • Portuguese • Really • Spanish • Speaker • Understand • Viceversa
Filed under: Language Study
Hi there,
My native language is Portuguese and I understand Spanish extremely well. I would say 95% of the time if people are talking to me in Spanish or I’m watching a Mexican or Venezuelan soap opera. Now, when Mexicans talk among themselves it can be a little tricky. Often times they’ll talk too fast and throw in a lot of slangs I’m not familiar with.
I have never come across a Spanish-speaking person that had as easy a time with Portuguese as I have with Spanish. And I’ve met plenty of Spanish speaker in Florida and in California!
I was told the reason it is easier for Brazilians to understand Spanish then it is for Spanish-speakers to understand Portuguese is because of the limited number of sounds present in the Spanish language compared to Portuguese.
Being bilingual and educated, I’m definitely not an average Brazilian. However, I do believe that most Brazilians understand Spanish quite well. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Spanish-speakers when it comes to Portuguese.
I studied French and Spanish– and Portuguese seems to be a real combo of the two.
After a few days in Brazil, I could understand quite a bit and my friend who speaks Portuguese can understand alot of Spanish.
I am a native spanish speaker and i find it much more difficult to understand portuguese than say, italian….although i can understand some words here and there in portuguese, there seems to be more of a similarity between italian and spanish.. …plus you must understand that there is a slight difference between brazilian portuguese and portuguese spoken by natives of portugal…also there are many different dialects of italian and that can also impact translation…bless your heart for being so ambitious… i tried to study italian in college and had to drop it because i kept confusing it with spanish…lol good luck
Although I’m not a native speaker I’ve been studying it for 5 years and I just started learning Italian, and I can DEFINITELY understand a lot of Portuguese. Those 2 languages and Italian have very very similar sounds, words, structures, etc. If someone is speaking Portuguese, I could tell you the jist of the conversation, although I wouldn’t understand the tenses and such.
For example, you said “Cidado de Deus” was the name of the movie? I’m gonna guess that’s Portuguese, and in Spanish it would be “Ciudad de Dios”. So there alone, you can see how similar the two languages are and how easy it is to pick up one from the other. Again, the nouns and such are similar, and I could probably pick up the root of some verbs, but again, not the tenses and such.
Just out of sheer curiosity, how long have you been studying these languages? I love talkin about languages and talkin to other people who love them, too. So sorry if I babbled, lol. E-mail me if you wanna talk languages and whatnot. I know that sounds weird, but I love languages! lol.
if i read it slowly i can sort of understand portuguese. when i hear it i can only pick up like 2% of the words. i’m able to decipher more of the words when i listen to italian.
I don’t know, but I thought I’d answer anyway because I study the same languages. I imagine a native Spanish speaker would understand Portuguese the same way an Italian speaker understands Spanish (and vice versa–when I have Mexicans working on my house, I can usually make small talk in Italian and have them understand. I can also have Spanish/Italian conversations with my stepsister.)
Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan and Italian speakers can all understand some of each other’s languages however comprehension will not always be perfect. Linguist William Labov has done studies which show how even the minor differences which exist in American English pronunciation from one city to another can sometimes interfere with mutual understanding when speakers from the two cities meet each other.