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-=> Carlos Navarro wrote to Sean Dennis <=-

 SD> and if you can speak one, you can generally understand the other.

 CN> No!
 CN> They have some similarities, but they're quite different, both written
 CN> and in pronunciation.
 CN> Italian and Portuguese are closer to Spanish.

Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian are all Romance
languages, meaning they come from Vulgar ("common") Latin and share common
roots.  I do not speak French nor Italian though I do speak a bit of
Spanish--I took a semester of it while in high school in 1987--and with that
knowledge, I have found it easy to understand French and Italian better.  I
have no experience with Portuguese and Romanian but I suppose if I tried, I
could probably do the same thing.

While your points about those languages being different, they indeed do
share a lot in common and if you understand that, you can make out the jist
of what is being said in all three languages.  Like (most) computer
languages to me, the semantics are the same but the syntax is different.

I unfortunately lost my "tongue" for Spanish as I had no one to converse in
Spanish with though I think with a bit of effort, I could bring myself back
up to at least to a conversational level.  French, to me, is overly
complicated for the sake of being different.   Spanish has always been
easy to speak for me because it tends to follow its own rules better than
English.

Being a native English speaker, it can be difficult for me to learn other
languages, especially Japanese or Mandarin Chinese (both of which I have
attempted to learn but failed to do so).

However, my original point still stands for me as I can figure out phrases
and keywords in both French and Italian and make a semi-educated guess to
what's going on.  This is reading those languages; if they are being spoken
to me, I get lost very quickly.

-- Sean

... Don't raise the bar.  It makes it too hard to get the drinks.
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