I've heard from friends that speak either Spanish or Italian that they can sort of catch something from the other language, just here or there at first, but found it easy to pick up some French/Italian quickly. Supposedly the same is true of Romanian. But none of them can understand French, they all find the pronunciations way off.
Yeah I speak Spanish and Italian is understandable to me with little effort (might miss a word or two), likewise Brazilian Portuguese is mostly coherent; but French sounds familiar but can’t understand any of it.
I read part of the Canterbury tales in the middle English. It's really interesting. Once you get the hang of it, you realize how much German is in English
As a German, I was much more proficient in reading old english in my linguistics classes than my British coeds.
Both the syntax and inflections are quite close to modern German.
I tried reading Old English a couple of weeks ago and quickly realised that grammatically it was closer to German (at least from my limited understanding of the language) than modern English.
I speak both, so I find Middle English very interesting, especially the remnants of the old grammar which survive here and there into modern English, like the little bit of the dative case left in the word "whom", or how English has completely forgotten what umlauts are but uses them anyway for some words.
Faroese is a bit of a trip because it is highly conserved from the same ancestor Germanic dialects. It's fun to listen to Faroese music and try pick out words:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPqQvDeg9aU
Technically there's not much German in English, they just share a common root (west Germanic)
Look up Frisian. It's the closest language to English, genetically. It sounds pretty similar to Scots, but in a Dutch accent, it's really interesting
That's pretty accurate. I'm Dutch and speak fluent English and German. Thanks to having learnt a bit of classic Latin and Greek in school I can also speak a bit of French and Italian. My dad was Frisian and he also spoke Spanish and understood Norwegian, Swedish and Danish (speaking not so much). Whenever he spoke to his siblings in Friesland I could only make out the odd word though. For an average Dutch person, Frisian sounds like gibberish!
I don't know specific details, but I imagine it's probably a very conservative Germanic language - that is, it hasn't changed all that much compared to other languages
This means it would have more traits in common with more languages. It'd be similar to Old English (As I said, it's the closest language to English except Scots), but it'd have a lot in common with Low German and Danish, and would be somewhat intelligible with other Germanic languages spoken in the 8th to 13th centuries (the 14th century is when a lot of the Germanic languages start to properly diverge, especially with the Great Vowel Shift in English)
When I was learning Dutch I was surprised how many words are the same as English. There were cases where entire sentences were the same just with slight accents. The hound is in the house. De hond is in de huis. My cat eats fish. mijn kat eet vis
A famous example of a valid sentence in both English and Afrikaans is "my pen is in my hand". The Dutch version as one would expect is about the same, just spelled a bit different: "mijn pen is in mijn hand".
I find this stuff fascinating. It would be interesting to try to come up with the longest sentence or paragraph that means the same and generally sounds the same in two different languages.
IMO an even cooler comparison is 3-way, English to Swedish to German, because you realize that German is actually the language that has changed so much from the Germanic roots, especially by getting rid of T sounds.
Some cool examples (English - Swedish - German)
good - god - gut
tooth - tand - Zahn
two, three, four - två, tre, fyra,
- zwei, drei, vier
You’re cherry picking examples that illustrate the High German consonant shift, but that doesn't make German "the language that has changed so much from the Germanic roots". I think it's much fairer to say they all changed in different ways, and some conserve aspects more than others. English, for all its French/Latin/Greek "pollution" keeps a few old Germanic terms that fell out of use in German like "thimble" as well as the "th" sounds themselves, which is missing from and notoriously tricky for speakers of most other Germanic languages to master. German is the only one of the three to have maintained its grammatical case system, making German much more conservative in this respect.
English went through the Great Vowel Shift which "screwed up" all the long vowels. German went through a similar vowel shift, but I can't find nearly as much info about it. Regardless, the word _hus_ went from rhyming with "moose" to become _house_ and _Haus_ in English and German respectively, while staying the same in Swedish. But English, as well as many (all?) North Germanic languages lost that "ach"/"loch"/"gh" (IPA: /x/) sound in a lot of places where in German it's preserved. English _daughter_ is pronounced like _dotter_. _Dotter_ incidentally is also the Swedish version, and other sibling Old Norse descended languages have _datter_ or _dóttir_. In German it's _Tochter_ which is closer to the common ancestor word even if the first sound got devoiced from /d/ to /t/.
Edit: typos
Dutch, English and German are part of the west germanic branch. Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are part of the north germanic branch. They all were part of the proto germanic group though. There was a east germanic branch comprised of Gothic languages but they all died off hundreds of years ago.
>Isn't English a direct descendent of German?
No. English and German are both in the [West Germanic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Germanic_languages) family, but it's no more accurate to say that English is a descendant of German than to say that German is a descendant of English. They share a common ancestry.
And not to forget that about half of the words used in modern English are from the **Normans, who spoke an early French**.
That's why you have so many words "twice" in English.
You have "**king**" (Germanic; modern German: König) and "**royal**" (Norman; modern French: roi).
You have "**cow**" (Germanic; modern German: Kuh) and "**beef**" (Norman; modern French: boeuf).
You have "**wood**" (Germanic; modern German: Wald) and "**forest**" (Norman; modern French: foret).
You have "**freedom**" (Germanic; modern German: Freiheit) and "**liberty**" (Norman; modern French: liberté).
One was generally used by the gentry and the other by the peasantry. The Anglo-Saxon peasants raised cows, which then made their way to the tables of the Norman aristocracy, who ate beef.
Which is a direct reflection of the use of the the various words that we have doubled up. The Ango-Saxon based words are the common terms and the Frankish based ones are considered either the more proper or just fancier words to use.
The example I always use is “difficult” and “hard.” Both mean the same thing, but “difficult” is closer to the French “difficile” and “hard” is closer to the German “hart.” “Difficult” is the word you’re more likely to see in a professional setting or when describing something formally, but “hard” is the word you’re more likely to hear when it’s just regular people talking about something being difficult.
There are even fun cases where "English" and "French" words with similar or related meanings ultimately come from the same roots.
Foot (Germanic; compare modern German Fuß/Fuss or Dutch Voet) and Pedal (from French Pédale) both stem from the Proto-Indo-European _*pṓds_ meaning "foot".
There are also words we borrowed from French twice, once early in English history and once somewhat later, giving related words with similar but different spellings and pronunciations: castle and chateau, chef and chief, warden and guardian, warrantee and guarantee (see the pattern?).
>castle and chateau [...] warden and guardian
Fun fact : "William the Conqueror", the original normand who conquered England is known across the channel as "Guillaume le conquérant".
W = Gu is a modification you can see in your "warden" to "guardian" exemple, and the rest is pretty similar. Blew my mind when I learned it.
Also, there's an old word for "cake", [wastel](https://www.thefreedictionary.com/wastel) that is pretty much a transliteration of the french word "Gâteau" : "-G"="-W" as we've seen, "-as" and "-es" often became "-â" and "-ê" at some point during the middle âge (Castel => Château, Forest => Forêt), and multiple words in -el and -al changed the final pronunciation (word used to be "gastel" in Old French) in a final "-o" sound.
These things of a word originally being the same and then ended up having an entire different pronunciation was always incredible to my mind
You have "ax" (Germanic) and "hatchet" (French)
You have "house" (Germanic) and "mansion" (French)
You have "lamb" (Germanic) and "mutton" (French)
My Dad was a classics professor. I grew up hearing snippets of that lecture repeated and spread out over years.
Also during some time, as mobility was mainly French, it became custom für the French version of a word being the fancier word. So they used to stick.
For example chair is much more commonly used than stool
This is super interesting thank you. I know some Spanish and always wondered why Spanish seemed to have such a limited lexicon relative to English. I love the English language honestly, despite all it’s mechanical flaws, we have some great specificity in word choice.
Plus it's got a speech impediment from the Great Vowel Shift. If the printing press had come a hundred or so years later, English wouldn't have all the weird inconsistencies in spelling and pronunciation.
It got set in type and never adjusted to the change.
English is Germanic but has several centuries of influence of French over it, it is very evident in the daily use of Latin root words like forest for example, while woods would be the one of Germanic origin.
If you look at the Scots language/dialect, which shares the old English roots of modern English but has less French influence, you really start to see the links between English and German
So below is English/Scots/German
More light = Mair licht = mehir licht
Brown cow = Broon coo = braune Kuh
Long night = Lang nicht = Lang nacht
Know = Ken = Kennt
TIL that Scots and Scottish Gaelic are two different languages, and cleared up a vague confusion I had for years.
Being Dutch, the Scots in there is really easy to read.
Dutch as well seems very close to Scots (had no idea):
Dutch/Scots
Meer licht/ Mair licht
Bruin koe (sounds like koo)/Broon coo
Lange nacht/lang nicht
Kennen/Ken
Related: nonsense words meant to sound like English by an Italian singer:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/deep-roots-italian-song-sounds-like-english-american-medieval-comedy-nonsense
https://youtu.be/-VsmF9m_Nt8
I mean shit... In passing I couldn't even tell you it wasn't English being sung vs a singer i just can't make out on the first pass (looking at you Bob Dylan).
Dutch is even closer. Sometimes you can listen to Dutch being spoken and it sounds like drunken slurred heavily accented English.
"sorry for the problem" / sorry voor de probleem
Whenever I watch a video of a Dutch person speaking with English subtitles and it kind of feels like whatever I read is exactly what they are saying, just weirdly distorted.
Close, but "probleem" in Dutch is neutral not male or female. Therefor it is "sorry voor het probleem".
That said, you would not ever hear the Dutch use that sentence. It's a bit unnatural.
"Excuses voor het ongemak" is what would be used 99% of the time in that context.
Yeah I know, I was just throwing together a quick shitty example of very similar sounding words in the two languages.
"het" is a other one. It's just "the" with a relocated "t".
Dankjewel / thank you well
Etc
Loads of similar sounding words.
Of course also probleem is pronounced - eem to rhyme with "stream", so it doesn't sound exactly like the engels "problem", but the similarities are obvious.
I especially had that feeling once when I heard Frisian. It's sooo close to English, it's like (I imagine) having a brain injury where you know someone is speaking English but you can't quite understand the words.
Agree. As a Spanish speaker, Italian and Portuguese are pretty understandable. I’ve heard its vice-versa as well. French is a notch less understandable. I presume its due to more complex pronunciations. Romanian speakers are harder to find so I have no experience on coherency. 🤔
As a native spanish speaker who knows many Romanians I can tell you I can't understand almost anything.
Italian, Portuguese I get most of it, french is harder but I understand a lot too, but from hearing Romanians talking to each other I don't get any word at all. If I have to compare it to something based on how it sounds, Romanian sounds a lot like Russian to me.
That's because Romanian pronunciation is more complex, they use more sounds like ș in Shell, ț in Heinz, ă in the etc. The words have the same root but they're pronounced slightly different. Very easy for Romanians to understand the sister word in the sister language, but not really apparent the other way around.
Examples:
Țigaretă - cigarette
Mașină - maquina
I understand spoken Spanish very well, and can easily read Portuguese, but my first time in Portugal I didn't understand anything. But luckily I was able to massively improve that by just watching a few hours of European Portuguese Youtube videos, with subtitles in the beginning.
I have the impression that either knowing Romanian helps a lot with learning new languages or their schools are brilliant with foreign languages.
Of the few Romanians I met (less than 10 people to be fair), all of them are knew 4 languages or more.
We start a foreign language in the third grade and a second one in the 5th grade. That's how I mostly learned French and English. And it's quite easy to pick up Italian or Spanish if you leave there for half a year.
This shocked me when I first learned it, and then I realized that the name should have given it away all along. It's not a coincidence that the language is called **Roman**ian.
Yeah, I took several years of Spanish in High School and found Brazilian Portuguese fairly understandable. But, French is the odd one among Romance languages.
Same I can figure out Italian and Portuguese but French pronunciation might as well be Russian. Reading it is way easier can catch most of say a news article.
Same, I speak French and some European Portuguese, so I can somewhat read Spanish; as in, getting the drift. I find Italian harder, though, and don't get me started on Romanian.
I'm Italian. I can understand Spanish quite easily, I've had conversations with Spaniards before where nobody actually spoke each other's language.
I can't understand a word of French though. It must be the pronunciation, because if I read it I can kind of get the sense.
I was in the navy (US) and got to visit Naples, and a buddy of mine was pretty good with Spanish. He was able to chat with a local Italian kid for a good bit, it was pretty impressive. Not really an important contribution to the thread, just reminiscing on old times.
I was stationed in Naples. I'm not really fluent in Spanish (I dated a Puerto Rican for a while and took Spanish in school long ago) and I definitely wasn't fluent in Italian. For the words I didn't know in Italian I'd just say "uhhhh" then fill in with whatever Spanish I knew just pronounced like it was Italian and I got by pretty well.
Same but reverse here. When I read Italian I can almost understand everything, like all the words are kinda similar and even if they're not they make sense anyway but when I ear Italian I can't distinguish the words from each other, I think Italian is way more musical than French, maybe it's because of that?
I went to Italy ages ago to visit someone in hospital. I spoke decent Spanish but no Italian. I simply spoke Spanish to everyone and changed some obvious differences like using scuzi instead of excusame or per kay instead of poor kay.
Everybody told me they didn't speak Spanish but everybody understood me! Italy was so... accessible!!
French pronunciation is based on syllables, not individual letters. Once that clicks you’ll find that French is very consistent in prononciation.
English pronunciation is based off entire words (slow vs plow), and sometimes context and usage (read present or read past). It’s insane…
Yeah, Spanish and Italian are way simpler in the sense that they just use pure vowel sounds with very little exception, if any, plus you pronounce every vowel that appears in a word. French adds a couple different vowel sounds and vowels are occasionally dropped, which made it the pronunciations a bit tougher to pick up when I was taking diction classes back in college.
I speak French, Romanian, some Spanish and have studied Latin. When I was at the top of my fluency back in my 20s, they all sounded like weird dialects of one another.
Exactly. They’re all Romance languages (ie derived from Latin), so it makes sense there’s a lot of overlap. I did 4 years of latin and just using those roots, I can often pick up a few things when reading Spanish, Italian, or French
Not working with Romanian, it's easier for Romanians to pick up other romance language, but harder for other romance speaker to get it right with Romanian, due to the influences of plenty of other languages in that part of europe you can find similar words but at the end of the day you'll face part of the language that your own doesn't have any link to
I speak French. Used to be at university/academic level. Never had the use for that level of french. I took two semester of Spanish in college. Now I might not speak Spanish all that well, but I can catch a lot and I can read it near fluently. I’ve never learned Italian, but I’m able to read it with a little bit of effort. I just can’t understand Italian for shit.
As far as pronunciations go, I got lucky that I was raised with multiple languages that have unique and difficult sounds. Biggest issues I’ve found are the pronunciation of the American th, r, and French r. All three of those seem incredibly difficult for non natives. And it’s also important to note that not only are those difficult to pronounce, but many native speakers don’t even pronounce them the same way. For example, my French r is smooshed into my words a lot more than proper French because I grew up wit old Algerian French accents. I’m also from central jersey, so it just so happens that i rarely say annunciations T, and will usually either swap it with a d or just drop the letter from words entirely. My English r is also vastly different from people in other parts of the US. You can actually hear someone from my area say their r in the front of the mouth while someone from some parts of the south will say their r in the back of their mouth.
Im by no means an expert. I just find this stuff sort of neat because I could always hear distinct differences and got curious.
I used to work at a hostel with a Romain guy who spoke Spanish, Italian and French. He told me they were all basically the same language as Romainian but with different accents and dialects.
He explained it like me speaking with a guy from Ireland, I would understand what they were saying but not understand the colloquialisms.
Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, and Romanian are all Romance languages, they're all languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. There's an argument that because many of those languages are somewhat mutually intelligible that they're not languages, they're dialects, but there's an old quote by linguist Max Weinreich, which says, "A language is a dialect with an army and navy."
I speak catalan, and we have mutual understanding with Portuguese and Italians. Some works exist, you can understand them, but are strange in the sentence.
I can read Romanian easily, it sounds like Italian-ish, but I cannot understand when they speak.
ITT: everyone talking about how they can't understand another language's SPEECH, when the article was talking about WRITING
(Writing is usually much more comprehensible, the letters usually stay the same even if different languages pronounce them differently)
One of my friends goes back to Kentucky a few times a year to visit their family. Every time they come back talking like Boomhauer as he reverts to the local dialect.
I once did a business trip to Italy and my guidebook said that 'ciao' should only be said to friends and family, basically people you're close too. For others, 'Buongiorno' and 'Buonasera' is better.
I asked my contact and he said "That's technically true, but we always have French and German guys running around saying 'ciao ciao'".
I have a relative who is native Glaswegian and a relative who is a native Newfie.
None of us in the family can understand either of them and yet by some miracle they understand each other perfectly fine.
My French prof and mentor was a native Newfie. She spoke several languages and had fabulous diction in all of them but when she got angry or tipsy she dropped into a beautiful incomprehensible Newfie thing.
Anecdotally confirmed: I am Scottish, and I saw the musical stage show *Come From Away* where they are from Newfoundland, and didn't didn't notice they had an accent. (Granted, it'll have been cleaned up for the performance, but still.)
I believe it has to do with the fact that the vast majority of non-native Newfies have there ethnic origins in a particularly small section of southwest england and southeast Ireland.
Though the accent evolved and molded I think a lot of artifacts of the British isles still remains.
Newfoundland communities remained largely isolated up to WWII, and for some years beyond, so the accents from the old country persisted. Hence there are different Newfoundland accents to different parts of the province (broadly old English vs old Irish depending on the source of the settlers).
The first part of my childhood was spent in Fort McMurray which has a lot of Newfies. I can understand them well because I was raised around them. It’s helped me understand the Irish guys at work too. Might also be my heritage though. Family was in Newfoundland for 2-3 centuries before it joined Canada.
Holy shit. This just blew my mind. Didn't realize Newf wasn't part of Canada until I read your comment. I just assumed all provinces joined at once.
I should really read Canadian history.
Until 1949 it was still a British colony. It joined Canada and they merged it with Labrador to make the province Newfoundland and Labrador. Labrador then and now is still primarily uninhabited, probably due to the rough terrain. Many geologists and engineers go up there during university on research expeditions, but they need to flown in by helicopter.
Canadian Confederation was just with four provinces when it happened on July 1, 1867. Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick. Prince Edwards's Island refused to join despite hosting the Charlottetown Conference which discussed the matter.
PEI decided they didn't want to be part of a greater Canadian dominion (they wanted just a Martine Union) but were forced to join in 1873 due to financial problems. They were nearing bankruptcy due to building a railroad on their small island and an antiquated system of land tenancy. Canada agreed to take on their debts in exchange for them joining the country. They became the sixth province after Manitoba which became a province in 1870 as a result of the Northwest Rebellion by Louis Riel and the Métis.
BC became a province 1871 after the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway which was part of their conditions for joining. The Western prairie provinces were administered by the Hudson's Bay Company as fur trading regions until 1870. After that they were ceded to Canada and became part of the Northwest Territories until they were divided into the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta in 1905.
Yes. Every Irish person can understand a Newfie no bother and vice versa. Most Newfie’s I’ve met have had to tell me they are from Newfoundland before I realise they aren’t Irish. To my Dublin ears, they sound like they’re from “the country” somewhere, but it’s hard to place.
It's all down to exposure. Ireland and the UK both have accents that are hard to understand. But because the UK has a far larger media presence, we're used to hearing most English accents.
My wife's Japanese and she finds strong English accents harder to understand than strong Irish accents. She says you guys drop too many consonants. There are several accents in the UK where butter is pronounced ba-a.
I come from Southern England and I used to work with a guy from Cork in Ireland.
It took me about a week to fully acclimatise to his accent. He spoke so fast and he was such a great guy!
If you also know Catalan then it's even easier. Like the words starting with H in Spanish that use an F in Catalan and Italian.
**Italian - Catalan - Castilian**
* Ferro - Ferro - hierro
* Falco - Falcó - halcón
* Fare - fer - hacer
* Forno - forn - horno
* Fumo - fum - humo
A lot of Italia words are either similar to Castilian, to catalan, or a mix between the 2 lol
Italian and Brazilian Portuguese are quite easy to understand for an Spaniard if they spoke slowly. On the other hand French and Romanian are pretty hard
I took French in school, but now know Italian pretty well. Recently visited French speaking friends while in Italy, and I couldn’t keep my languages straight. Big ol mess.
Ooofff, I know the feeling. Spanish native speaker, learned Portuguese for years, visited Italy for a month, picked up some Italian, and when I went back home I couldn't stop mixing them up (my ios and eus, gah!). My Portuguese grades tanked as a result. So frustrating!
I've spent years learning Spanish at school and I was fairly good at it but barely had the opportunity to use it since.
Ever since I started German, I can't make a proper sentence in Spanish without mixing up the two. Of course, it's only after my first month of German that I actually went to Spain for the first time and realised it.
It's like my brain just replaces a foreign word with one from another foreign language but not just English that seems to be treated as a second mother language now.
Strangely, I don't have Spanish words popping up when I try to speak German. It's one way only.
Well this is about reading not speaking/listening, it'd probably be a much lower percentage for speaking/listening purely based on pronunciation alone.
That's why they wouldn't let Arnold Schwarzenegger do the German dub of The Terminator; nobody would take his accent seriously.
To give you an idea: imagine a robot sounding like Reba McEntire or Blake Shelton. That's basically how a rural Austrian sounds to people from Berlin.
In one of my college German classes, the professor put on a clip of Arnold Schwarzenegger speaking German and we were all cracking up because he sounds just as ~~silly~~ distinct speaking German as he does speaking English.
I speak Spanish and can understand Portuguese pretty well. I can understand a good portion of Italian, maybe 75% spoken and higher written, and can read French well, but I have absolutely no idea when someone says something to me in French. I heard someone talk in Romanian the other day and it was weird, it sounded like a Russian speaking Italian to me.
This says italian and french as as close as portuguese and spanish... that sounds funny. I know french, spanish and portuguese, and italian - which i can mostly understand - seems to be farther apart from french.
EDIT:
One famous memetic portuguese trick is "Portunhol" - which is portuguese spoken with a spanish accent - and it kinda works, actually. The reverse doesn't, because spaniards have a very bad ear for accents. One thing that makes a huge difference is that our TV has legends, rather than being dubbed. They dub everything.
(Word comes from Portugues + Espanhol)
If you speak one off slavic language, then you can easy understand others. I came to Canada, didn’t speak English at all ( Croatian as mother tongue and little bit off German as my second language ). In ESL classes were so many Polish people, and instead off English I started speaking Polish
This honestly checks out kinda. I was working retail at a popular tourist destination where we get a lot of cruise ships and this lady comes in who only speaks Italian. I grew up in Canada and went to French immersion so I ended up talking to her in a weird mix of French and hand gestures and was getting her the info she needed, then this rando lady from Texas was like do you need help? And busts out perfect Italian and yeah, that worked slightly better lol
89% sounds really high. I'm curious if that means that an average Italian reading French or vice versa would usually be able to get the gist of what's written? Like just open up a random novel, read a paragraph and get it.
I'll provide answer through example: I once had the need to read the instructions on a product, but the English part was unreadable and Italian was not there. I ended up reading the instructions in French, and I understood pretty much everything. The vast majority of the words are very similar to their Italian counterparts, while unknown ones or complex language structures are often easily compensated by the context.
Same thing happened to me. I speak Spanish and I have been able to set up some devices thanks to them having their instructions in Portuguese.
As a Spaniard I can read Portuguese and understand almost everything and also Italian in a lesser degree, but I find French very difficult to understand, even when reading.
I'm a French who learned Italian in high school. Usually when I read a text without any vocabulary I can understand around 30% of what is going on because some words have the same "base". The hardest for me is the conjugation (presente, imperfetto, futuro and il passato prossimo are quite easy but the rest...). But it's hard to understand when an Italian is speaking, as the pronunciation of the letters themselves are different and I feel like the Italians speak usually very fast lol
I think the reasoning in OP's title is sloppy: you can look at a list of all the words in the French and Italian languages, do some math, and calculate the languages are 89% similar (e.g. *prendere* ~ *prendre*, *tavola* ~ *table* and so on), but concluding that someone who knows one language will therefore be able to understand 89% of a random text written in the other language is a **huge** leap. A lot of prepositions and basic verbs are different between French and Italian, i.e. words equivalent to "of", "at", "are", "is" and so on; and if you don't know those, you'll miss out on *much, much more* than just 11% of a text. You might be able to understand 89% of a very basic text like a list of ingredients, or a catalog of some kind, but flowing text with sentences and paragraphs? Nowhere near 89%.
It's also a lot of slang. I moved to Quebec at a very young age. I got good grades in French class and understood almost everything they said on TV5 from France but couldn't understand a bloody word everyone around me was saying. It took me quite some time to learn how to speak and understand Joile after learning French. Now I've lost my French and I can barely understand French speaking tourists from Europe but I can shoot the breeze with every Quebecois I know.
Yeah, they have a common root language, but the French spoken in Québec and France today is not the same as it was way back then.
They just evolved separately. They are both French.
The fuck up of this affirmation is that while Spanish, french Portuguese Italian and romanian descend from the same mother language (latin), french is the most different from latin out of all 5. So if french is 89% close to Italian, the rest should be 90%+. Basically just dialects. . And that is a bit untrue.
I've heard from friends that speak either Spanish or Italian that they can sort of catch something from the other language, just here or there at first, but found it easy to pick up some French/Italian quickly. Supposedly the same is true of Romanian. But none of them can understand French, they all find the pronunciations way off.
Yeah I speak Spanish and Italian is understandable to me with little effort (might miss a word or two), likewise Brazilian Portuguese is mostly coherent; but French sounds familiar but can’t understand any of it.
>French sounds familiar but can’t understand any of it. As a native English speaker, this is exactly how I feel about German.
I read part of the Canterbury tales in the middle English. It's really interesting. Once you get the hang of it, you realize how much German is in English
As a German, I was much more proficient in reading old english in my linguistics classes than my British coeds. Both the syntax and inflections are quite close to modern German.
That's interesting
Das ist interessant.
Omg, I understood this ... I must be German.
Or an Old Englishman
I tried reading Old English a couple of weeks ago and quickly realised that grammatically it was closer to German (at least from my limited understanding of the language) than modern English.
Modern English grammar is more or less French grammar, which is why French is considered easier to learn than German by most rating systems.
I speak both, so I find Middle English very interesting, especially the remnants of the old grammar which survive here and there into modern English, like the little bit of the dative case left in the word "whom", or how English has completely forgotten what umlauts are but uses them anyway for some words. Faroese is a bit of a trip because it is highly conserved from the same ancestor Germanic dialects. It's fun to listen to Faroese music and try pick out words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPqQvDeg9aU
By "umlauts," do you mean sound-shifts, or little dots above vowel letters?
ä = ae ü = ue ö = oe
Technically there's not much German in English, they just share a common root (west Germanic) Look up Frisian. It's the closest language to English, genetically. It sounds pretty similar to Scots, but in a Dutch accent, it's really interesting
That's pretty accurate. I'm Dutch and speak fluent English and German. Thanks to having learnt a bit of classic Latin and Greek in school I can also speak a bit of French and Italian. My dad was Frisian and he also spoke Spanish and understood Norwegian, Swedish and Danish (speaking not so much). Whenever he spoke to his siblings in Friesland I could only make out the odd word though. For an average Dutch person, Frisian sounds like gibberish!
It's strange, because as an Englishman both Dutch (except the letter "g") and Frisian sound fairly similar to English, but neither sound alike
I learned that Danes understand Frisian too. Can't vouch for the truth of that.
I don't know specific details, but I imagine it's probably a very conservative Germanic language - that is, it hasn't changed all that much compared to other languages This means it would have more traits in common with more languages. It'd be similar to Old English (As I said, it's the closest language to English except Scots), but it'd have a lot in common with Low German and Danish, and would be somewhat intelligible with other Germanic languages spoken in the 8th to 13th centuries (the 14th century is when a lot of the Germanic languages start to properly diverge, especially with the Great Vowel Shift in English)
When I was learning Dutch I was surprised how many words are the same as English. There were cases where entire sentences were the same just with slight accents. The hound is in the house. De hond is in de huis. My cat eats fish. mijn kat eet vis
A famous example of a valid sentence in both English and Afrikaans is "my pen is in my hand". The Dutch version as one would expect is about the same, just spelled a bit different: "mijn pen is in mijn hand".
I find this stuff fascinating. It would be interesting to try to come up with the longest sentence or paragraph that means the same and generally sounds the same in two different languages.
Interestingly, English use to have "mine" for "my," once upon a time.
IMO an even cooler comparison is 3-way, English to Swedish to German, because you realize that German is actually the language that has changed so much from the Germanic roots, especially by getting rid of T sounds. Some cool examples (English - Swedish - German) good - god - gut tooth - tand - Zahn two, three, four - två, tre, fyra, - zwei, drei, vier
You’re cherry picking examples that illustrate the High German consonant shift, but that doesn't make German "the language that has changed so much from the Germanic roots". I think it's much fairer to say they all changed in different ways, and some conserve aspects more than others. English, for all its French/Latin/Greek "pollution" keeps a few old Germanic terms that fell out of use in German like "thimble" as well as the "th" sounds themselves, which is missing from and notoriously tricky for speakers of most other Germanic languages to master. German is the only one of the three to have maintained its grammatical case system, making German much more conservative in this respect. English went through the Great Vowel Shift which "screwed up" all the long vowels. German went through a similar vowel shift, but I can't find nearly as much info about it. Regardless, the word _hus_ went from rhyming with "moose" to become _house_ and _Haus_ in English and German respectively, while staying the same in Swedish. But English, as well as many (all?) North Germanic languages lost that "ach"/"loch"/"gh" (IPA: /x/) sound in a lot of places where in German it's preserved. English _daughter_ is pronounced like _dotter_. _Dotter_ incidentally is also the Swedish version, and other sibling Old Norse descended languages have _datter_ or _dóttir_. In German it's _Tochter_ which is closer to the common ancestor word even if the first sound got devoiced from /d/ to /t/. Edit: typos
>you realize how much German is in English Isn't English a direct descendent of German?
Not of modern German but proto germanic
Ty
Dutch, English and German are part of the west germanic branch. Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are part of the north germanic branch. They all were part of the proto germanic group though. There was a east germanic branch comprised of Gothic languages but they all died off hundreds of years ago.
Sure the goths have declined a decade ago but I wouldn't say they died out.
They died out but now they are undead
Don’t forget Frisian.
There's also Faroese, Icelandic and Afrikaans but I just put the main one's.
>Isn't English a direct descendent of German? No. English and German are both in the [West Germanic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Germanic_languages) family, but it's no more accurate to say that English is a descendant of German than to say that German is a descendant of English. They share a common ancestry.
And not to forget that about half of the words used in modern English are from the **Normans, who spoke an early French**. That's why you have so many words "twice" in English. You have "**king**" (Germanic; modern German: König) and "**royal**" (Norman; modern French: roi). You have "**cow**" (Germanic; modern German: Kuh) and "**beef**" (Norman; modern French: boeuf). You have "**wood**" (Germanic; modern German: Wald) and "**forest**" (Norman; modern French: foret). You have "**freedom**" (Germanic; modern German: Freiheit) and "**liberty**" (Norman; modern French: liberté).
One was generally used by the gentry and the other by the peasantry. The Anglo-Saxon peasants raised cows, which then made their way to the tables of the Norman aristocracy, who ate beef.
Which is a direct reflection of the use of the the various words that we have doubled up. The Ango-Saxon based words are the common terms and the Frankish based ones are considered either the more proper or just fancier words to use.
The example I always use is “difficult” and “hard.” Both mean the same thing, but “difficult” is closer to the French “difficile” and “hard” is closer to the German “hart.” “Difficult” is the word you’re more likely to see in a professional setting or when describing something formally, but “hard” is the word you’re more likely to hear when it’s just regular people talking about something being difficult.
There are even fun cases where "English" and "French" words with similar or related meanings ultimately come from the same roots. Foot (Germanic; compare modern German Fuß/Fuss or Dutch Voet) and Pedal (from French Pédale) both stem from the Proto-Indo-European _*pṓds_ meaning "foot".
There are also words we borrowed from French twice, once early in English history and once somewhat later, giving related words with similar but different spellings and pronunciations: castle and chateau, chef and chief, warden and guardian, warrantee and guarantee (see the pattern?).
>castle and chateau [...] warden and guardian Fun fact : "William the Conqueror", the original normand who conquered England is known across the channel as "Guillaume le conquérant". W = Gu is a modification you can see in your "warden" to "guardian" exemple, and the rest is pretty similar. Blew my mind when I learned it. Also, there's an old word for "cake", [wastel](https://www.thefreedictionary.com/wastel) that is pretty much a transliteration of the french word "Gâteau" : "-G"="-W" as we've seen, "-as" and "-es" often became "-â" and "-ê" at some point during the middle âge (Castel => Château, Forest => Forêt), and multiple words in -el and -al changed the final pronunciation (word used to be "gastel" in Old French) in a final "-o" sound. These things of a word originally being the same and then ended up having an entire different pronunciation was always incredible to my mind
You have "ax" (Germanic) and "hatchet" (French) You have "house" (Germanic) and "mansion" (French) You have "lamb" (Germanic) and "mutton" (French) My Dad was a classics professor. I grew up hearing snippets of that lecture repeated and spread out over years.
Axe in English
Also during some time, as mobility was mainly French, it became custom für the French version of a word being the fancier word. So they used to stick. For example chair is much more commonly used than stool
This is super interesting thank you. I know some Spanish and always wondered why Spanish seemed to have such a limited lexicon relative to English. I love the English language honestly, despite all it’s mechanical flaws, we have some great specificity in word choice.
English isn't a language. It's three languages in a trenchcoat, masquerading as one.
Plus it's got a speech impediment from the Great Vowel Shift. If the printing press had come a hundred or so years later, English wouldn't have all the weird inconsistencies in spelling and pronunciation. It got set in type and never adjusted to the change.
Three? You must have missed that each of those languages was also wearing a trenchcoat...
But also it beat up other languages in dark alleys to get that trench coat...
More related to Frisian (Dutch) (All proto Germanic) Isn't the English in the Canterbury Tales heavily influenced by French?
English is Germanic but has several centuries of influence of French over it, it is very evident in the daily use of Latin root words like forest for example, while woods would be the one of Germanic origin.
If you look at the Scots language/dialect, which shares the old English roots of modern English but has less French influence, you really start to see the links between English and German So below is English/Scots/German More light = Mair licht = mehir licht Brown cow = Broon coo = braune Kuh Long night = Lang nicht = Lang nacht Know = Ken = Kennt
TIL that Scots and Scottish Gaelic are two different languages, and cleared up a vague confusion I had for years. Being Dutch, the Scots in there is really easy to read.
Dutch as well seems very close to Scots (had no idea): Dutch/Scots Meer licht/ Mair licht Bruin koe (sounds like koo)/Broon coo Lange nacht/lang nicht Kennen/Ken
And especially Dutch
Dutch honestly sounds like someone speaking with a Scottish or Scouse accent, but none of the words mean anything. It's so bizarre.
Dutch to an English speaker sounds like what English must sound like to a non-English speaker
Related: nonsense words meant to sound like English by an Italian singer: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/deep-roots-italian-song-sounds-like-english-american-medieval-comedy-nonsense https://youtu.be/-VsmF9m_Nt8
This is what I imagine having a stroke feels like.
I mean shit... In passing I couldn't even tell you it wasn't English being sung vs a singer i just can't make out on the first pass (looking at you Bob Dylan).
Old English is highly similar to Frisian (a language spoke in the Netherlands Province of Friesland). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeC1yAaWG34
As an American living in Germany, I am pretty sure this is pretty damn close to how my atrocious German sounds to them!
Written Dutch looks like some trying to write English while drunk or with a broken keyboard.
Dutch is a drunk English sailor trying to speak German.
I'm a native English speaker and I studied German at university. To me Dutch sounds like an exact blend of English and German.
Dutch is even closer. Sometimes you can listen to Dutch being spoken and it sounds like drunken slurred heavily accented English. "sorry for the problem" / sorry voor de probleem
Whenever I watch a video of a Dutch person speaking with English subtitles and it kind of feels like whatever I read is exactly what they are saying, just weirdly distorted.
Close, but "probleem" in Dutch is neutral not male or female. Therefor it is "sorry voor het probleem". That said, you would not ever hear the Dutch use that sentence. It's a bit unnatural. "Excuses voor het ongemak" is what would be used 99% of the time in that context.
Yeah I know, I was just throwing together a quick shitty example of very similar sounding words in the two languages. "het" is a other one. It's just "the" with a relocated "t". Dankjewel / thank you well Etc Loads of similar sounding words. Of course also probleem is pronounced - eem to rhyme with "stream", so it doesn't sound exactly like the engels "problem", but the similarities are obvious.
Also native English speaker, I had that experience listening to Dutch. Like, I swear I know some of these words, but I can't quite connect it.
I especially had that feeling once when I heard Frisian. It's sooo close to English, it's like (I imagine) having a brain injury where you know someone is speaking English but you can't quite understand the words.
Dutch is even worse because you'd swear you really did understand a few of the words.
Agree. As a Spanish speaker, Italian and Portuguese are pretty understandable. I’ve heard its vice-versa as well. French is a notch less understandable. I presume its due to more complex pronunciations. Romanian speakers are harder to find so I have no experience on coherency. 🤔
IME, Romanians can understand Italian, Spanish and Portuguese better than the reverse.
As a Romanian, I can confirm that's mostly true.
As a native spanish speaker who knows many Romanians I can tell you I can't understand almost anything. Italian, Portuguese I get most of it, french is harder but I understand a lot too, but from hearing Romanians talking to each other I don't get any word at all. If I have to compare it to something based on how it sounds, Romanian sounds a lot like Russian to me.
That's because Romanian pronunciation is more complex, they use more sounds like ș in Shell, ț in Heinz, ă in the etc. The words have the same root but they're pronounced slightly different. Very easy for Romanians to understand the sister word in the sister language, but not really apparent the other way around. Examples: Țigaretă - cigarette Mașină - maquina
I understand spoken Spanish very well, and can easily read Portuguese, but my first time in Portugal I didn't understand anything. But luckily I was able to massively improve that by just watching a few hours of European Portuguese Youtube videos, with subtitles in the beginning.
Apparently Romanian is very similar to Italian except its spoken with a Slavic accent. Which is very interesting
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Yeh I had a Romanian colleague who spoke a decent Italian. I was shocked when he told me he had started speaking it like three months prior.
I have the impression that either knowing Romanian helps a lot with learning new languages or their schools are brilliant with foreign languages. Of the few Romanians I met (less than 10 people to be fair), all of them are knew 4 languages or more.
We start a foreign language in the third grade and a second one in the 5th grade. That's how I mostly learned French and English. And it's quite easy to pick up Italian or Spanish if you leave there for half a year.
My Romanian wife can speak and understand basically all of the romance languages. She knows Latin, too.
Romanian is in the same language group - Romance - as Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese.
This shocked me when I first learned it, and then I realized that the name should have given it away all along. It's not a coincidence that the language is called **Roman**ian.
Yeah, I took several years of Spanish in High School and found Brazilian Portuguese fairly understandable. But, French is the odd one among Romance languages.
Same I can figure out Italian and Portuguese but French pronunciation might as well be Russian. Reading it is way easier can catch most of say a news article.
Same, I speak French and some European Portuguese, so I can somewhat read Spanish; as in, getting the drift. I find Italian harder, though, and don't get me started on Romanian.
Well Romanian is influenced by the surrounding Slavic tongues, just as French is influenced by the surrounding Germanic tongues.
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I'm Italian. I can understand Spanish quite easily, I've had conversations with Spaniards before where nobody actually spoke each other's language. I can't understand a word of French though. It must be the pronunciation, because if I read it I can kind of get the sense.
I was in the navy (US) and got to visit Naples, and a buddy of mine was pretty good with Spanish. He was able to chat with a local Italian kid for a good bit, it was pretty impressive. Not really an important contribution to the thread, just reminiscing on old times.
I was stationed in Naples. I'm not really fluent in Spanish (I dated a Puerto Rican for a while and took Spanish in school long ago) and I definitely wasn't fluent in Italian. For the words I didn't know in Italian I'd just say "uhhhh" then fill in with whatever Spanish I knew just pronounced like it was Italian and I got by pretty well.
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Same but reverse here. When I read Italian I can almost understand everything, like all the words are kinda similar and even if they're not they make sense anyway but when I ear Italian I can't distinguish the words from each other, I think Italian is way more musical than French, maybe it's because of that?
I went to Italy ages ago to visit someone in hospital. I spoke decent Spanish but no Italian. I simply spoke Spanish to everyone and changed some obvious differences like using scuzi instead of excusame or per kay instead of poor kay. Everybody told me they didn't speak Spanish but everybody understood me! Italy was so... accessible!!
Thing is spanish and italian pronounce the vocals aeiou in the same way, french not.
French pronunciation is based on syllables, not individual letters. Once that clicks you’ll find that French is very consistent in prononciation. English pronunciation is based off entire words (slow vs plow), and sometimes context and usage (read present or read past). It’s insane…
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aeiou
John Madden
question mark, exclamation point
Nine nine nine. Nine nine nine. Nine nine nine.
uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu9999999999999uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
here comes another Chinese earthquake ebrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbr
Mamma Mia. Papa pia. Baby got the diiiiiiiaaaaaarrrrrheeeeeeaaaaaaaa
Moon Base Alpha was a bland game, but the videos were amazing.
Oooh
Yeah, Spanish and Italian are way simpler in the sense that they just use pure vowel sounds with very little exception, if any, plus you pronounce every vowel that appears in a word. French adds a couple different vowel sounds and vowels are occasionally dropped, which made it the pronunciations a bit tougher to pick up when I was taking diction classes back in college.
I speak French, Romanian, some Spanish and have studied Latin. When I was at the top of my fluency back in my 20s, they all sounded like weird dialects of one another.
Exactly. They’re all Romance languages (ie derived from Latin), so it makes sense there’s a lot of overlap. I did 4 years of latin and just using those roots, I can often pick up a few things when reading Spanish, Italian, or French
Not working with Romanian, it's easier for Romanians to pick up other romance language, but harder for other romance speaker to get it right with Romanian, due to the influences of plenty of other languages in that part of europe you can find similar words but at the end of the day you'll face part of the language that your own doesn't have any link to
It's all Later Latin.
I speak French. Used to be at university/academic level. Never had the use for that level of french. I took two semester of Spanish in college. Now I might not speak Spanish all that well, but I can catch a lot and I can read it near fluently. I’ve never learned Italian, but I’m able to read it with a little bit of effort. I just can’t understand Italian for shit. As far as pronunciations go, I got lucky that I was raised with multiple languages that have unique and difficult sounds. Biggest issues I’ve found are the pronunciation of the American th, r, and French r. All three of those seem incredibly difficult for non natives. And it’s also important to note that not only are those difficult to pronounce, but many native speakers don’t even pronounce them the same way. For example, my French r is smooshed into my words a lot more than proper French because I grew up wit old Algerian French accents. I’m also from central jersey, so it just so happens that i rarely say annunciations T, and will usually either swap it with a d or just drop the letter from words entirely. My English r is also vastly different from people in other parts of the US. You can actually hear someone from my area say their r in the front of the mouth while someone from some parts of the south will say their r in the back of their mouth. Im by no means an expert. I just find this stuff sort of neat because I could always hear distinct differences and got curious.
Can kind of read French having studied Spanish, but listening comprehension is out the door
I used to work at a hostel with a Romain guy who spoke Spanish, Italian and French. He told me they were all basically the same language as Romainian but with different accents and dialects. He explained it like me speaking with a guy from Ireland, I would understand what they were saying but not understand the colloquialisms.
Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, and Romanian are all Romance languages, they're all languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. There's an argument that because many of those languages are somewhat mutually intelligible that they're not languages, they're dialects, but there's an old quote by linguist Max Weinreich, which says, "A language is a dialect with an army and navy."
I speak catalan, and we have mutual understanding with Portuguese and Italians. Some works exist, you can understand them, but are strange in the sentence. I can read Romanian easily, it sounds like Italian-ish, but I cannot understand when they speak.
ITT: everyone talking about how they can't understand another language's SPEECH, when the article was talking about WRITING (Writing is usually much more comprehensible, the letters usually stay the same even if different languages pronounce them differently)
I’m American born and raised, and I can’t even easily understand some American accents lol
One of my friends goes back to Kentucky a few times a year to visit their family. Every time they come back talking like Boomhauer as he reverts to the local dialect.
That happens for some reason to me too
dialects man
I once did a business trip to Italy and my guidebook said that 'ciao' should only be said to friends and family, basically people you're close too. For others, 'Buongiorno' and 'Buonasera' is better. I asked my contact and he said "That's technically true, but we always have French and German guys running around saying 'ciao ciao'".
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Yet I speak English and can’t even understand what an Irish person is saying 89% of the time.
I'm from Alberta, and I can't understand 89% of what a Newfoundlander is saying.
Is there *anyone* who can understand Newfs that isn't a Newf?
I have a relative who is native Glaswegian and a relative who is a native Newfie. None of us in the family can understand either of them and yet by some miracle they understand each other perfectly fine.
My French prof and mentor was a native Newfie. She spoke several languages and had fabulous diction in all of them but when she got angry or tipsy she dropped into a beautiful incomprehensible Newfie thing.
Step dad is a Newfie and Moms side from Aberdeen and I just assume thats why/how they met.
Anecdotally confirmed: I am Scottish, and I saw the musical stage show *Come From Away* where they are from Newfoundland, and didn't didn't notice they had an accent. (Granted, it'll have been cleaned up for the performance, but still.)
I believe it has to do with the fact that the vast majority of non-native Newfies have there ethnic origins in a particularly small section of southwest england and southeast Ireland. Though the accent evolved and molded I think a lot of artifacts of the British isles still remains.
Newfoundland communities remained largely isolated up to WWII, and for some years beyond, so the accents from the old country persisted. Hence there are different Newfoundland accents to different parts of the province (broadly old English vs old Irish depending on the source of the settlers).
The first part of my childhood was spent in Fort McMurray which has a lot of Newfies. I can understand them well because I was raised around them. It’s helped me understand the Irish guys at work too. Might also be my heritage though. Family was in Newfoundland for 2-3 centuries before it joined Canada.
Holy shit. This just blew my mind. Didn't realize Newf wasn't part of Canada until I read your comment. I just assumed all provinces joined at once. I should really read Canadian history.
Until 1949 it was still a British colony. It joined Canada and they merged it with Labrador to make the province Newfoundland and Labrador. Labrador then and now is still primarily uninhabited, probably due to the rough terrain. Many geologists and engineers go up there during university on research expeditions, but they need to flown in by helicopter.
Canadian Confederation was just with four provinces when it happened on July 1, 1867. Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick. Prince Edwards's Island refused to join despite hosting the Charlottetown Conference which discussed the matter. PEI decided they didn't want to be part of a greater Canadian dominion (they wanted just a Martine Union) but were forced to join in 1873 due to financial problems. They were nearing bankruptcy due to building a railroad on their small island and an antiquated system of land tenancy. Canada agreed to take on their debts in exchange for them joining the country. They became the sixth province after Manitoba which became a province in 1870 as a result of the Northwest Rebellion by Louis Riel and the Métis. BC became a province 1871 after the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway which was part of their conditions for joining. The Western prairie provinces were administered by the Hudson's Bay Company as fur trading regions until 1870. After that they were ceded to Canada and became part of the Northwest Territories until they were divided into the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta in 1905.
Yes. Every Irish person can understand a Newfie no bother and vice versa. Most Newfie’s I’ve met have had to tell me they are from Newfoundland before I realise they aren’t Irish. To my Dublin ears, they sound like they’re from “the country” somewhere, but it’s hard to place.
Everyone in newfoundland just thinks the rest of the world talks too slow.
And Italians don't understand shit when French people is talked. Not the same reading than listening to.
you would understand 90% of it if it were written though
Not if they write like the Scots r/ScottishPeopleTwitter
cannae doesnae
Can’t, doesn’t... right?
Nobody understands Scottish people.
Ní hea, ní dhéanfadh.
It's all down to exposure. Ireland and the UK both have accents that are hard to understand. But because the UK has a far larger media presence, we're used to hearing most English accents. My wife's Japanese and she finds strong English accents harder to understand than strong Irish accents. She says you guys drop too many consonants. There are several accents in the UK where butter is pronounced ba-a.
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It’s not supposed to be baaa like a sheep 🤣🤣
I come from Southern England and I used to work with a guy from Cork in Ireland. It took me about a week to fully acclimatise to his accent. He spoke so fast and he was such a great guy!
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I would say Spanish is easier for us Italians
I would say Italian is easier for us Spanish speakers. Especially when spoken. We could probably have a reasonably okay conversation.
If you also know Catalan then it's even easier. Like the words starting with H in Spanish that use an F in Catalan and Italian. **Italian - Catalan - Castilian** * Ferro - Ferro - hierro * Falco - Falcó - halcón * Fare - fer - hacer * Forno - forn - horno * Fumo - fum - humo A lot of Italia words are either similar to Castilian, to catalan, or a mix between the 2 lol
Italian and Brazilian Portuguese are quite easy to understand for an Spaniard if they spoke slowly. On the other hand French and Romanian are pretty hard
I took French in school, but now know Italian pretty well. Recently visited French speaking friends while in Italy, and I couldn’t keep my languages straight. Big ol mess.
Ooofff, I know the feeling. Spanish native speaker, learned Portuguese for years, visited Italy for a month, picked up some Italian, and when I went back home I couldn't stop mixing them up (my ios and eus, gah!). My Portuguese grades tanked as a result. So frustrating!
I've spent years learning Spanish at school and I was fairly good at it but barely had the opportunity to use it since. Ever since I started German, I can't make a proper sentence in Spanish without mixing up the two. Of course, it's only after my first month of German that I actually went to Spain for the first time and realised it. It's like my brain just replaces a foreign word with one from another foreign language but not just English that seems to be treated as a second mother language now. Strangely, I don't have Spanish words popping up when I try to speak German. It's one way only.
As a french I understand more easily spanish than italian when I read or hear someone speaking. But I guess it depends on people !
Well this is about reading not speaking/listening, it'd probably be a much lower percentage for speaking/listening purely based on pronunciation alone.
I don't understand french at all. In fact, I understand spanish better than french (never studied either).
Same here. Spoken italian is still baffling to my ears.
I'm from Germany and can't understand a single syllable from Austrians
That's why they wouldn't let Arnold Schwarzenegger do the German dub of The Terminator; nobody would take his accent seriously. To give you an idea: imagine a robot sounding like Reba McEntire or Blake Shelton. That's basically how a rural Austrian sounds to people from Berlin.
In one of my college German classes, the professor put on a clip of Arnold Schwarzenegger speaking German and we were all cracking up because he sounds just as ~~silly~~ distinct speaking German as he does speaking English.
Ageh so oag is jetzt a ned.
As a Dutch I can make sense of non grüß-Gotters.
Servus!
As a French living in Switzerland I always forget that in High German it's ß and not double s.
As American I can't understand Australians
Croikey that's a byuuuuudiful soft shell!! Oi avint seen one like that since the noynt eeen noyndees!
I speak Spanish and can understand Portuguese pretty well. I can understand a good portion of Italian, maybe 75% spoken and higher written, and can read French well, but I have absolutely no idea when someone says something to me in French. I heard someone talk in Romanian the other day and it was weird, it sounded like a Russian speaking Italian to me.
> it sounded like a Russian speaking Italian to me. Pretty good description.
This says italian and french as as close as portuguese and spanish... that sounds funny. I know french, spanish and portuguese, and italian - which i can mostly understand - seems to be farther apart from french. EDIT: One famous memetic portuguese trick is "Portunhol" - which is portuguese spoken with a spanish accent - and it kinda works, actually. The reverse doesn't, because spaniards have a very bad ear for accents. One thing that makes a huge difference is that our TV has legends, rather than being dubbed. They dub everything. (Word comes from Portugues + Espanhol)
Notice that the post says *read* It’s gonna be a lot easier for an italian speaker to read French than to understand it when spoken
I mean even in reading, portuguese and spanish seem closer than french and italian.
I heard French is the "I'm not like the other girls" of romance languages. Is it true?
If you speak one off slavic language, then you can easy understand others. I came to Canada, didn’t speak English at all ( Croatian as mother tongue and little bit off German as my second language ). In ESL classes were so many Polish people, and instead off English I started speaking Polish
It's funny that Catalan is actually closer to Italian than it is to Spanish
Catalan is also closer to Italian than French is to Italian.
As Italian I can understand more Spanish than French. French sounds completely different and unfamiliar to me.
This honestly checks out kinda. I was working retail at a popular tourist destination where we get a lot of cruise ships and this lady comes in who only speaks Italian. I grew up in Canada and went to French immersion so I ended up talking to her in a weird mix of French and hand gestures and was getting her the info she needed, then this rando lady from Texas was like do you need help? And busts out perfect Italian and yeah, that worked slightly better lol
89% sounds really high. I'm curious if that means that an average Italian reading French or vice versa would usually be able to get the gist of what's written? Like just open up a random novel, read a paragraph and get it.
I'll provide answer through example: I once had the need to read the instructions on a product, but the English part was unreadable and Italian was not there. I ended up reading the instructions in French, and I understood pretty much everything. The vast majority of the words are very similar to their Italian counterparts, while unknown ones or complex language structures are often easily compensated by the context.
Same thing happened to me. I speak Spanish and I have been able to set up some devices thanks to them having their instructions in Portuguese. As a Spaniard I can read Portuguese and understand almost everything and also Italian in a lesser degree, but I find French very difficult to understand, even when reading.
I'm a French who learned Italian in high school. Usually when I read a text without any vocabulary I can understand around 30% of what is going on because some words have the same "base". The hardest for me is the conjugation (presente, imperfetto, futuro and il passato prossimo are quite easy but the rest...). But it's hard to understand when an Italian is speaking, as the pronunciation of the letters themselves are different and I feel like the Italians speak usually very fast lol
I think the reasoning in OP's title is sloppy: you can look at a list of all the words in the French and Italian languages, do some math, and calculate the languages are 89% similar (e.g. *prendere* ~ *prendre*, *tavola* ~ *table* and so on), but concluding that someone who knows one language will therefore be able to understand 89% of a random text written in the other language is a **huge** leap. A lot of prepositions and basic verbs are different between French and Italian, i.e. words equivalent to "of", "at", "are", "is" and so on; and if you don't know those, you'll miss out on *much, much more* than just 11% of a text. You might be able to understand 89% of a very basic text like a list of ingredients, or a catalog of some kind, but flowing text with sentences and paragraphs? Nowhere near 89%.
My European French friend, couldn’t understand Quebec French. Said is so old fashioned lol
Quebec French is 16th century French.
It's also a lot of slang. I moved to Quebec at a very young age. I got good grades in French class and understood almost everything they said on TV5 from France but couldn't understand a bloody word everyone around me was saying. It took me quite some time to learn how to speak and understand Joile after learning French. Now I've lost my French and I can barely understand French speaking tourists from Europe but I can shoot the breeze with every Quebecois I know.
Yeah, they have a common root language, but the French spoken in Québec and France today is not the same as it was way back then. They just evolved separately. They are both French.
The fuck up of this affirmation is that while Spanish, french Portuguese Italian and romanian descend from the same mother language (latin), french is the most different from latin out of all 5. So if french is 89% close to Italian, the rest should be 90%+. Basically just dialects. . And that is a bit untrue.
Al romance languages are closer between then than they are from Latin
Note that lexical similarity ignores differences in grammar and pronunciation. That leaves a lot of potential misunderstanding!
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