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Can a Spanish speaker understand French? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| grunts67 Diglot Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5303 days ago 215 posts - 252 votes  Speaks: French*, English Studies: Spanish, Russian | Message 17 of 31 20 April 2013 at 12:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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The average native Spanish speaker can't understand French with some form of study. At the moment, I'm teaching a class of new children immigrant. We do 4 hours of French per day and in my class got a huge proportion of native Spanish speaker (12 of 17). They are in the intermediate class (B1) and there's so many words that sound so differently to them (even thought they are for the same family), expressions and sentence structures that I need to explain make my really doubt the intelligibility between the two languages.
The average native French speaker will not understand Spanish. We might understand a couple of words but that about it. I think learning Spanish for a French person is easier than the other way around but they still need the practice and time. However, I do think Spanish is easy to learn for French people compare to other languages but it will take some dedication and effort. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| haitike Newbie Spain Joined 4448 days ago 25 posts - 35 votes Speaks: Spanish* Studies: EnglishB1, Arabic (Written), Japanese | Message 18 of 31 22 April 2013 at 11:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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Im a native Spanish speaker, and french is quite difficult to understand.
Easier to harder for me: 1) Galician 2) Catalan 3) Portuguese 4) Italian 5) French 6) Romanian But Italian is a lot lot easier than french. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| yuehan Tetraglot Newbie United States Joined 4379 days ago 12 posts - 20 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Mandarin, Greek, French, Indonesian, Haitian Creole, Modern Hebrew, Somali, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 19 of 31 22 April 2013 at 11:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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Not from first-hand experience, but I was once talking to a man in Panama along with my
friend who is bilingual in French and English, but does not know Spanish. Since the conversation was in Spanish, I paused to translate for him, but he said that he understood what we were saying because of his French. Maybe this just has to do with exposure (living in the United States). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| vogue Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4255 days ago 109 posts - 181 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish Studies: Ukrainian | Message 20 of 31 24 April 2013 at 2:33pm | IP Logged | ||
I can say I don't have the same level of transparency as the native Spanish speakers I know that talk to Italians. However, as I study Italian I'm consistently amazed at how well the Spaniards and Italians I know are able to communicate with each other, because there are a lot of words that differ or are false cognates. When I was in Italy last week I was talking to a Spaniard who told me that she only had a few problems understanding Italian when she first arrived, and now it was very easy. Hearing some other native Speakers opinions on here makes me think the situation I know is somewhat unique and a result of the urge/necessity to communicate between the groups. Maybe the ability varies depending on the particular brand/dialect of Spanish (for me I speak a Latin American/European blend because I learned some words while living in the Americas and others in Madrid - maybe if I was a European Spanish speaker it'd be easier), exposure to the other language, or something about how a person's brain is "wired." But from experience, when there have been communication problems, if I say it in Spanish the Italians I know can usually understand me... Even if I struggle to understand them. Maybe Italians have an easier time of understanding Spanish than the other way around. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| overscore Triglot Newbie CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4564 days ago 23 posts - 38 votes Speaks: French*, English, German | Message 21 of 31 27 April 2013 at 11:40am | IP Logged | ||
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French has had some outstanding phonological changes compared to the other romance languages, which is
probably why much of the intelligibility is lost. Word-initial 'k' went to 'sh'. The schwa sound is *very* unstable in French. Important morphological functions were lost, the plural is not even marked for. The language is nasal sounds on steroids. I always complain that I can't understand anything of spoken Spanish, whereas written Catalan is mostly transparent (I haven't studied any other romance tongue (save for English lol) ). Portuguese is to me the most familiar sounding one. It, French and Romantsch are the only non pro-drop romance languages, too. ---- By the way, this is something i've been wondering for a while now. What's the general take on how much Quebec French changed since its first days? Is there any information on the subject? Common propaganda here has it it's more faithful to old French than the current hexagonal variety, but we know how that goes.. Edited by overscore on 27 April 2013 at 11:58am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5229 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 22 of 31 30 April 2013 at 4:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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What's interesting is that French and Spanish are more closely related than Italian and Spanish, so, prima facie, you'd expect them to be more mutually intelligible.
Linguists separate Romance languages based on (inter alia) the La Spezia--Rimini line in Northern Italy. Languages have interesting isoglosses that differ on either side of the line. For example, north (and west) of the line plurals are marked in -s, and in the south and east, plurals are marked by vowel changes. Intervocalic consonants above the line are weakened (to the point of extinction in some cases) while they're preserved below the line. Thus you have the weakening of [k] to [g], from Latin amicus to Spanish amigo (it's actually even weaker than that, since the Spanish "g" is in most cases an approximant, not a full stop). And of course in French, ami, the [k] has vanished altogether. But in Italian amico, the [k] sound has remained (though it is palatized in the masculine plural). So even though the languages are closer, it seems as if the rapid changes in French have so pushed the language past its related dialects that even those Romance dialects more distantly related have more mutual intelligibility at this point. The why of that is probably an interesting question in itself. France was conquered by Germans, but so was Spain. And Spain was then occupied for centuries by those speaking a language of an entirely different family. My guess, a priori, would be Spanish as the more radically different, not French. One interesting nuance here is that intelligibility between the languages depends on your linguistic savvy. For instance, a native Spanish speaker may not know what sounds are related, historically, between the languages. So while I hear "vache" and immediately recognize it as a cognate between Spanish and French, since [k] was palatized in French, a native Spanish speaker probably wouldn't connect the two sounds. They'd be more likely to connect the "g" in "agua" with the "cqu" in Italian "acqua," since, though different, those sounds are closer (e.g., both stops, identifical point of articulation). 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| pbromide Bilingual Triglot Groupie United States Joined 4548 days ago 76 posts - 98 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Swedish | Message 23 of 31 30 April 2013 at 5:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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No. I was listening to a movie in French the other day and my mom thought it was just a
bunch of swear words before she realized it was French. The phonology of French makes it very difficult for Spanish speakers who know no French to understand even if you speak using as many cognates as possible. The change in stress (a perceived stress on the final syllable of every word, or sometimes just at the end of the sentence) makes many cognates sound completely foreign. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6273 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 24 of 31 10 May 2013 at 4:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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I would say not. French is actually something of an oddity among the Romance languages, especially phonetically, and that cannot make it easy for other Romance speakers to understand it without special study.
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