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Author Topic: Portuguese and Spanish languages?  (Read 596 times)

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Offline ChuckJ

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Portuguese and Spanish languages?
« on: May 27, 2011, 08:18:46 PM »
Although I took a couple of years of Spanish in school, I can't carry on a conversation in Spanish. I can read a very small amount, and I can pick up some words here and there in conversation. With that in mind, I was reading while the wife was watching a movie. Some of the actors were speaking what was supposed to be Portuguese, but I recognized some of the words in the conversations from my time in Spanish class. I assume they both originate from a Latin base, but how similar are the two languages? Are they similar enough that a Portuguese speaker and a Spanish speaker could converse at least at a basic level?
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Offline DumbAss Tanker

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Re: Portuguese and Spanish languages?
« Reply #1 on: May 28, 2011, 07:33:16 AM »
From ny limited experience, they're about as close together as the Scandinavian Peninsula Germanic languages are with the Continental Germanic languages, so probably yes at a truly basic level.  A lot of the vocabulary is recognizably similar but the spelling is totally different.

ETA - the way the two languages are spoken is pretty different.  Every Portuguese speaker I've ever heard was on maximum volume but with a very flat inflection, Spanish speakers (Like English speakers) convey an awful lot of the subtleties of their sentences by tone and inflection rather than just the words themselves.
« Last Edit: May 28, 2011, 07:39:48 AM by DumbAss Tanker »
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Offline ChuckJ

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Re: Portuguese and Spanish languages?
« Reply #2 on: May 28, 2011, 05:21:31 PM »
Thanks DAT. I had never given it much thought until the movie.
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