• The Octonaut@mander.xyz
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      1 year ago

      French and Portuguese are similar enough that you could make out what someone is saying.

      Also, Star Trek is in English

      • moody@lemmings.world
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        1 year ago

        Written, you could get a vague sense of what’s being said. Spoken, the two languages are absolutely not intelligible. You might pick up a couple of words that are close enough but definitely not enough to have anything close to a conversation.

        Portuguese and Spanish are much closer in terms of intelligibility.

        • Promethiel@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          In my (only partially humorous) opinion: French snobbiness is displayed the most strongest upon the French language.

          It is the least mutually intelligible of the mainstream Romance languages with any of the others. By design.

          The notions of purity and ripping off Latin- words, expressions, and structures in the 17th century that lead to the Académie Française formalized things. But France’s geography and history also pushed the language into it’s own harder than the others.

      • The_Walkening [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        French and Portuguese are similar enough that you could make out what someone is saying.

        I know a little Spanish and I can sorta make out Brazilian Portuguese/French/ other romance languages. Spoken European Portuguese is nearly incomprehensible to me.

  • southbayrideshare@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    If one was from France and the other was from Portugal, they missed an opportunity to meet in the middle and speak Andorian/Andorran. He could still read her poetry but without all the ducking involved in Klingon courtship.

    • Thranduil@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      You can. Step 1 find a group that welcomes non language speakers. I used mmos to try. Can also just have 1 person. But I find guilds better since you get more exposure. Step 2 ignore grammar and just caveman it. Why many word when few work. Then when you no longer need google translate to understand and to talk learn grammar. Language is a tool for communication so focus on being understood before proper sentence and conjugation.

        • Thranduil@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It depends on what your goal is. If its simply to communicate it does not have to take that long sure it will be very broken

          Me hungry me eat instead of I eat when I am hungry but as long as you get the message across you have succeded with communicating.

    • Zloubida@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I tried to learn English for years. At school, and then outside school, but I couldn’t make any serious progress.

      And then I learnt Esperanto. Because Esperanto is regular and almost logical, in a few weeks I was able to speak to foreigners in a language that wasn’t my mother tongue. And that experience permitted me to speak English, even if I totally stopped to try to learn it. Something clicked in my brain. I’m still no Shakespeare, I’m sure there are tons of errors in this message, but I can now read (even novels), understand, write and speak English comfortably.

      If one is raised in a monolingual environment, the brain begins to believe that there are no other other language it can speak as efficiently as the first language. And it’s true. But this shouldn’t be a barrier; and to make this barrier fall is one of the hardest parts in language learning. But the good news is that once it fell for one language, it fell for all languages. Of course there are other ways than Esperanto to make it fall, but it was the one which worked for me.

    • Fogle@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      It helps that they’re so incredibly similar. My Portuguese grandmother can speak well enough to french, Italian, and Spanish people. Just from each person using their own language