this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
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It’s really weird for me as a spanish speaker. I can nearly read french since a lot of the words are cognates but when i hear it spoken i might understand one word in twenty. Their pronunciations are fucked.
Haha, I have the same problem but with spanish as a french speaker. I find italian much easier to understand.
Honestly same for me with italian.
Can I ask what you think of portuguese pronunciation? I can read it but its not possible for me to understand it when spoken... In comparison I learned spanish at school and it was the easiest langage to learn thanks to my french.
I'm not a speaker of any Romance language, but Portuguese does sound kinda Slavic to me for some reason. That part of the Eastern European Portugal meme checks out.
LangFocus has a video about that effect. It's called something like "Why does Portuguese sound like Russian". There are quite some phonetic and phonotactic similarities
Link: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=Pik2R46xobA
There's actually a lot of totally separate parallels here, I guess they just hit a certain critical mass when combined.
Written portuguese is fairly easy to read for me. Every now and then I'll respond to brazilians in spanish when they have a funny meme and they'll write back in portuguese. Yay mutual intelligibility.
Spoken portuguese is damn near impossible for me to understand. I know a few phrases and words because my buddy is fluent and says them every now and then but the language sounds like spanish while holding marbles in your mouth. I will say that spanish also sounded unintelligible to me before i learned to speak it so maybe I just need to go live in Rio de Janeiro.
As a Portuguese we usually understand our neighbors from Spain, like they speak spanish and we can kinda more or less understand some meaning even without knowing the language, for example when traveling there, but if we talk portuguese to them their brain shuts down, they are not able to understand anything we say.
French phonology was heavily influenced by Germanic languages, unlike Spanish and Italian.
For better or for worse, the orthography (writing system) did not really keep up with the changes.
So instead of French being half way between Italian and Spanish, like you might expect, it's really it's own thing when it comes to pronunciation.
I don't know how big this effect really is but French changed their orthography during the renaissance to make it more Latin like
The woes of a rather conservative orthography and an aggressively evolved phonology.