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Can a Spanish speaker understand French? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Gomorritis Tetraglot Groupie Netherlands Joined 4067 days ago 91 posts - 157 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English, Catalan, French Studies: Greek, German, Dutch | Message 25 of 31 10 May 2013 at 8:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think that 1/4 of the population of Spain who also speaks catalan, understands written French a bit better than
other Spaniards, but when it comes to oral French, they are probably just as clueless. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4454 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 26 of 31 10 May 2013 at 11:06pm | IP Logged | ||
When I was learning French at school being able to speak Italian helped. Given a sentence with an unknown French word I could often guess which (slightly) similar sounding Italian word might be the best fit. Not being surprised at genders (and the close match in gender between Italian and French) plus the whole verb conjugation thing and the similarities in grammar all made it fairly painless to pick up some understanding of the written language and that obviously helped with the spoken language. However, if I watch French TV I tend to struggle: it takes me quite a while to "tune in" and even then I only have a general sense of what is going on and I can lose the thread very easily. If I watch Spanish TV, OTOH, I can get the gist much more easily even though I've never studied Spanish at all. I've heard a few of my relatives say that they don't speak Spanish but they can understand it reasonably well. In a conversation where both parties co-operate, this works quite well (since each side can adjust based on feedback from the partner). I've never found that to work for French - there I'm relying on what I've learned and there doesn't seem to be much help in the decoding process from my Italian (at least not in the near-real-time required for a reasonable conversation). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4738 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 27 of 31 20 May 2013 at 7:05am | IP Logged | ||
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It is the phonology of French that renders it far more difficult to understand for
Spanish speakers. In fact, Italian and French are significantly closer in both grammar and vocabulary than either is with Spanish. But because Italian has a closer phonology to Spanish, immediate comprehension (which is based on sound and not grammar rules), is made more evident. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Surtalnar Tetraglot Groupie Germany Joined 4185 days ago 52 posts - 67 votes Speaks: German*, Latin, English, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), Arabic (classical) | Message 28 of 31 21 May 2013 at 11:48am | IP Logged | ||
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What about Portuguese? Do those people understand (and learn) French easier than Spanish people, because of the nasals?
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| vogue Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4043 days ago 109 posts - 181 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish Studies: Ukrainian | Message 29 of 31 21 May 2013 at 5:40pm | IP Logged | ||
Portuguese speakers may find it easier to learn French (at least compared to other non- native French speakers) as far as pronunciation goes. That being said: they share less vocabulary with French speakers than Spanish, and to my understanding Portuguese grammar is more closely related to Spanish grammar. I've heard that French grammar is more related to Italian grammar (which I find similar to, but notably different than Spanish grammar). I have not studied French grammar though, so this maybe inaccurate. I believe Spanish/Portuguese are 85-90% similar, and French/Portuguese are around 80%. From personal experience: I have never heard a Portuguese speaker and a French speaker cross-communicating. However, I have seen that intuitive and educated Portuguese speakers can understand a relatively large amount of Spanish (provided the Spanish speaker is cooperative). The bigger problem in that relationship, I've discovered, is an equally well-educated Spaniard typically has far more trouble understanding the Portuguese speaker (probably due to the increased amount of sounds in the language). Personally, from a non-native Spanish speakers perspective this is what I've seen: -I can understand written Portuguese enough to get main points in newspapers, and - spoken I understand some random words and phrases. -I can understand the basic gist of a French news article (English-French similarities), but no real specifics. I do not understand the spoken language at all. I understand a little more written with the Italian studies than I did before. -Before I began learning Italian I could not read the language well, but I could pick up the gist of conversations. I know native Spanish speakers could pick out far more of the language than I could, as sometimes they had to repeat the Italian for me in Spanish. Clearly they understood, and I didn't, though I could often hear the similarity after. Interestingly, I've had Italians tell me they can read French (but if a French man read it they wouldn't understand it), but don't understand a word of written Spanish (but will understand it spoken). I'm not sure if every Italian speaker feels this way, but interesting nonetheless, especially given my own experience of not being able to read Italian as a Spanish speaker, but being able to understand a bit of the spoken language. Edited by vogue on 21 May 2013 at 5:44pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6386 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 30 of 31 21 May 2013 at 8:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah, for me the written Portuguese/Spanish to Italian transition was a bit hard. gn/gl/che/ghe are all written differently and the schwa before s+consonant is attached to the article instead of the word itself (lo scorpione vs escorpião/escorpión - wow, never thought of it in these terms before!)
edit: but nevertheless as a linguist I was able to do this transition fairly naturally. lyricstraining has been helpful for that, and simply reading. I think to anyone who already knows nasal vowels French would sound as less of a mess/gibberish, but I don't think there's any immediate usefulness for the comprehension. Edited by Serpent on 21 May 2013 at 9:14pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mrmap167 Tetraglot Newbie United States Joined 4472 days ago 21 posts - 23 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Italian, German | Message 31 of 31 22 May 2013 at 7:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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One of my best friend is Venezuelan (with whom I converse in Spanish on occasion). I also have a friend from Andalucia, Spain at my college.
When I first started learning Spanish in 9th grade, I had the advantage since I already knew French decently. I always thought that Spanish was spoken much too fast. Fast forward to now. I understand pretty much anything in spoken and written Spanish. For my best friend and the other friend, they have NO idea what I say when I speak French (whereas be speaking to a friend from Cote D'Ivoire or Congo in my dorm or my mom on the phone). But they understand it mostly when I write out what I just said. For Spanish speakers (since French is a Romance language like Spanish): written French is fairly easy, but spoken French is really hard. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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