this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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I think it's impressive that she speaks them with that much confidence and she sounds like she put in the hours to learn each one. I just think that Romance languages like Portuguese, Catalan and most French feel like cheating for Spanish speakers and vice-versa, though. It's not uncommon for us to learn those languages in a few months. Still, mad respect for reaching out to her fans like that.
While you can transfer a lot of knowledge from a Romance language into another, I wouldn't call it "cheating"; people do this all the time when learning a new language, even unrelated or not-closely-related ones.
In special, both her Portuguese and Italian show that she spent quite a bit of time/effort actually studying/training the languages, she isn't just breezing through mutual Romance intelligibility.
Yeah, I don't mean to downplay her effort. She did say in her Portuguese interview that she learned it "in a month when she was 18" which was pretty much my experience learning a bit of French a few years back which I can mostly read after passively absorbing the grammar. It feels like reading Spanish for the most part.
Are you exaggerating when you say a few months? Because based on my personal experience as a native English speaker who's spent a combined ~14 years to study two languages (only one of which even stuck), I cannot imagine becoming more than "hooray I can occasionally pick out a word or two when watching the news!"-level of proficient in a new language after a few months, even with intense study.
Native speakers of a romance language are already at "occasionally pick out a word or two when watching the news" level or better for other romance languages, without having to study them at all. They simply share a lot of words amongst themselves. Becoming decently conversational in a few months is not an exaggeration.
redacted for privacy :3
Oh, not exaggerating at all. I can read quite a bit of Portuguese because it's quite similar to Spanish and also French because I learned some grammar. It's very much like reading German for English speakers. It can be tricky, but if you get the hang of mapping out some words between the two languages, it becomes much easier than it seems.
I think they were more referring to how knowing Spanish, a Latin-based language, can help in learning another Latin-based languages.
English is primarily Germanic-based so it falls out of the category for the most part.
I think the REAL "cheating" example is Spanish & Catalan.
I took 5 years in HS/college, and when I was in the Barcelona airport, I actually asked "why is everything written twice?" The differences seemed very very minor.
But I speak english poorly, and spanish... not really. So she's still 700% better than me!
I'm a Spanish speaker that is afraid of French. I cannot make any of those sounds.
What helped me was Michael Thomas's method for learning French. I literally played the CD once back in college and most of it stuck because the grammar is similar to Spanish and he makes it easy to learn. French vocabulary is a bit of a guessing game but it's easier once you get the hang of it. You should give it a try, it only takes like a couple of days of passive listening.