this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
504 points (99.0% liked)

Linguistics Humor

201 readers
136 users here now

Do you like languages and linguistics ? Here is for having fun about it


Share this community: [[email protected]](/c/[email protected])


Serious Linguistics community: [email protected]


Rules:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Haha, I have the same problem but with spanish as a french speaker. I find italian much easier to understand.

[–] teft 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Honestly same for me with italian.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] teft 3 points 1 week ago

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.