A quick question to the Spanish speakers of this forum

How about the Spanish/Portugese/Italian people here understanding Romanian? When travelling through Romania, my poor knowledge of those Romanic languages helped me quite a bit in understanding the basics and explaining myself somewhat (the usual “A large beer please”, “How much octane is this?” and “I’m innocent, i didn’t know it was illegal!”). I found it easier to read than to listen to though.

By the way, from my experiences, knowing a language not too well does help in understanding another, similar language. With my pretty basic knowledge of Russian i found myself a few times much better able to deal with Belarussian, Bulgarian or Polish than those who are much, much better in Russian than i am. Fuzzy grammar and shady vocabulary works!

Originally posted by Geforce
much like the Dutch can understand German, but not the other way around. Or South Africans can understand Dutch easily, but we don’t understand them (unless it’s written).

Not really I can understand and read Dutch quite fine. Speaking is a problem though.

And like a German from the north has a difficult time understanding one from the south!

Or I have much sifficulties understanding what some french speaking Swiss say!

Spanish people don´t have much problems to undestand portuguese (not Brazilian, whose accent is very different to the one spoken in Portugal). Portuguese written language is even easier. Same happens with Italian, which is very similar. BUT in Galicia (northwest of Spain) and where I live and formely forming a Kingdom with Portugal, we have Galician language which is virtually 90 per cent portuguese spoken with Spanish accent. Besides, most portuguese are able to speak Spanish at least in the North.

much like the Dutch can understand German, but not the other way around. Or South Africans can understand Dutch easily, but we don’t understand them (unless it’s written).

Thats pretty interesting.. over where I live, there are numerous people of Portugeuse background and they all do seem to figure out Spanish pretty well, and I was wondering if the same could be done vice versa.

In another similar case, I also noticed Turkish people are able to understand what Kazakhs and Uighurs are saying but also, not the other way around.

Its very easy for portuguese speakers to understand spoken spanish. Its almost impossible for spanish speakers to understand portuguese being spoken. I can barely pick anything up when I listen to portuguese, but when I read it Id say I recognize about 50% as common to spanish.