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Spanish-Italian Transparency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7375 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes  12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 1 of 52 09 January 2010 at 9:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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For those who wonder about how close Italian is to Spanish, I saw in Spain intriguing conversations where one person spoke in Italian with the other nodding and answering in Spanish. This in a tourist setting, with people probably not bilingual in both languages. I saw it several times when Italian tourists where discussing with Spaniards who spoke no Italian but understood it.
People who study both Italian and Spanish can see for themselves the proximity, but I thought that perhaps hearing about this natural test of transparency would interest some of you. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6271 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 2 of 52 09 January 2010 at 10:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've used Spanish as a default language talking to Italians on several occasions. Not perfect intelligibility (my Spanish isn't great) but it more or less worked.
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| TheBiscuit Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico Joined 5922 days ago 532 posts - 619 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Italian Studies: German, Croatian | Message 3 of 52 10 January 2010 at 12:59am | IP Logged | ||
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When I taught English to multilingual classes in London I would often see the Spanish, Italian and Portuguese speakers having conversations with each other in their respective languages. It is interesting to listen to.
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| victor-osorio Diglot Groupie Venezuela Joined 5431 days ago 73 posts - 129 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: Italian | Message 4 of 52 10 January 2010 at 1:40am | IP Logged | ||
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Well, I'm a native speaker of Spanish and all I can say is that the transparency of
those three Romance languages (Italian, Portuguese and Spanish) is highly overrated. I mean, we can understand a great deal of lexical content (e.i., nouns) and thus we can interpret, based on the context, what are we talking about. It's a matter of guessing more than understanding on my own experience. Once, I went to London and stayed at a young traveller's hostal. I shared a room with a brazilian guy. We could talk about things BUT IT WAS PRETTY IMPORTANT to be in front of the things we were talking in order to understand each other. Also, it was very difficult to talk about abstract stuff. The simple word "forget" in Spanish and brazilian was SO different. OLVIDAR in Spanish and ESQUECER on portuguese. I spend like 20 minutes trying to tell him that "I forget your name". Not funny. Anyway, people often think that it's easier to understand, let's say, Italian when you speak Spanish but in my experience, once you learn Italian, you realise there's A LOT of details you're missing in the information if you don't know the language. The difference between Spanish and Italian, I've read somewhere, is something like 30% of the words. That means that probably you will be missing 30% of the information. A big deal, IMHO. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Guido Super Polyglot Senior Member ArgentinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6527 days ago 286 posts - 582 votes Speaks: Spanish*, French, English, German, Italian, Portuguese, Norwegian, Catalan, Dutch, Swedish, Danish Studies: Russian, Indonesian, Romanian, Polish, Icelandic | Message 5 of 52 10 January 2010 at 10:02am | IP Logged | ||
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The trasparency between those 3 languages is very high, something like
+80%. Personally, I think it's not overrated. But, yes, it's more guessing than understanding, since the non-italian speaker don't even know how to conjugate verbs in Italian. I know some people that don't speak Italian but get the idea of what Italians are talking about (as long as they don't speak too fast). The same goes for Portuguese. Have a nice day! Guido- Edited by Guido on 10 January 2010 at 10:02am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6271 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 6 of 52 10 January 2010 at 4:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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In the Spanish film Ay Carmela, set in the Spanish Civil War, an Italian fascist soldier complains to the main Spanish characters, "Why can't you speak Italian?" He refers particularly to their pronunciation of Macedonia cigarettes. They say Mathedonia, he says Machedonia. Yet they can more or less communicate with each other.
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| datsunking1 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5584 days ago 1014 posts - 1533 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Russian, Dutch, French | Message 7 of 52 10 January 2010 at 4:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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I could understand most of what my ex girlfriends family said in Brazilian Portuguese, and I didn't even start studying it yet :)
hahaha The best thing about Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc is that many words are similar/the same, and many articles are the SAME in each language :D 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5846 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 52 10 January 2010 at 6:27pm | IP Logged | ||
This is a useful observation. I would theoretically have prognosed that this can function, as I see enough similarities in both languages. I wouldn't want to try it out myself, as speaking Italian to a Spaniard or speaking Spanish to an Italian would certainly cause language interferences between the two languages. Fasulye Edited by Fasulye on 10 January 2010 at 6:28pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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