Experience in languages' similarities
Since it's a Spanish forum, probably this is a question more to native speakers. Some languages are still different but at the same kind of related. Do you understand portugese? Are you even able to speak?.. (If you speak Spanish) I noticed that without any grammar knowledge, those who speak lithuanian are able to understand (unfortunately, not to speak) latvian and sanscrit (latvians are neighbours, but sanskrit origins from India!) languages. They have lots of similar words.
Does anybody has similar examples and experience in languages' similarities?
14 Answers
Hi Swing
There are many similarities between Danish, Swedish and Norwegian even though they would sound different to someone who did not know any of them. There are also some very surprising differences.
Portuguese is much easier for me to get than other Romance languages.
What's tough for me about Portuguese is that my brain just clicks into Spanish when I don't know a particular conjugation or vocab word. I get kind of lazy and just make something up that sounds vaguely Portuguese but has nothing to do with reality. But overall, spoken and especially written Portuguese I think are fairly easy once you've learned Spanish or are a native speaker.
In general, learning one language makes it that much easier to learn another and I've even found that it gives you random insights into your own native language at the same time.
... ok, except for Basque and Hindi. Those are hard. I kind of gave up for a while on those 
My dad is Spanish and is also fluent in Italian although he has never been to Italy- he had to do Italian for a year at Junior school. He told me that it is easier to learn Italian and most people do in Tenerife, because of the similiarities of grammar. Although, the Italians and French are much stricter on their grammar.
What a fascinating discussion!
I've studied Spanish, French, Portuguese, German and Russian (and I can say "I don't speak Bosnian" in Bosnian!).
My Portuguese teacher was Brazilian; after just a few lessons I could understand her spoken Portuguese quite well.
After you've studied one foreign language, additional ones come more easily because you've mastered the basics of language learning: grammar concepts, gender, noun declension, etc. Once I "got" the distinction between the tú and Ud. forms of address, for example, it wasn't a big deal to learn the same concept in the other languages.
I will say, however, that the ability to learn and retain really diminishes with age. Young people: pack in all that information now!
My husband is from India (Andhra Pradesh). The state language is Telugu. Since I study Spanish, basically all of the time my brain is in half-English half-Spanish mode. Since we have met over four years ago, I have found some oddly similar peculiarities between Telugu and Spanish, which I attribute to the historical presences of Moors in both areas (my hypothesis sans actual research).
For example, en español, an orange is "naranja." It's the same in Telugu, you just pronounce the "j" like an English "j."
The other day I also found out (while doing homework for my translation class) that p*cha (the vulgar Mexican meaning) means the exact same thing in Telugu, and is even used in a derogatory manner.
For a spaniard , is easy to understand italian and portuguese people . Maybe , you're not going to understand the 100% of the words , but for sure you're going to understand the sense of the conversation . it's so easy to understand . This laguages has the same mother language : Latin . And there are more examples . A german , and a dutch , can make a conversation too , using everyone his own language .
Nuxita said:
In general, learning one language makes it that much easier to learn another and I've even found that it gives you random insights into your own native language at the same time.
Since I am still learning Spanish, I don't have a ton of expertise in this area. However I have found the above statement to be so true. I am now constantly thinking about the English language. My ears seem to be fine tuned to every strange idiom and expression that we use every day. I also think of all of the rules and contradictions to rules and wonder how anyone can even learn English in the first place. 
Also, in answering the original question, I have found that since I am a musician (which uses the Italian language) and also have Italian speaking relatives, I am able to understand quite a bit more of this language, now that I have been studying Spanish. Just looking at an Italian menu, you can see many similarities.
Learning a second language opens so many doors of understanding and opportunity. 
Languages come in families. Spanish is a Romance language - evolving from Latin. So it is related (among many others) to French, Portugese and Italian. The latter two being most similar.
Then further north there are Germanic languages - German, Polish and English.
On the fringes of western Europe many Celtic languages survive - Galician, Irish and Scots Gaelic, Welsh, Cornish, Bretagne...
Further north still, you have Nordic languages - Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic.
So within each family there are similarities, and the families influence each other in places i.e. English can trace many words back to Latin.
And the only two languages in Europe that are in no way connected to any other language are Finnish and Basque.
I disagree with Marianne on this one. I can understan a great deal of Portuguese, and I find I can even carry on a Spanish - Portuguese conversation with Brazilian speakers. The accent of Portugal's speakers is too hard for me to understand a easily, but I can still understand most of what is written.
On the other hand, I may get the general gist of a text in Italian or French, but I can't really communicate nor understand the detail.
Other close languages are Gallego and Catalán, which I can understand roughly as much as Brazilian Portuguese, without having studied them.
My ex-wife is from Portugal and she, at 5 years old, and her family moved to the USA. Naturally, she speaks English like a native, but her mother never learned English, so I would speak to her in Spanish - and she understood - and she would speak to me in Portuguese - and I understood most of what she said.
I also realized after learning Russian at an intermediate level that Spanish and Russian have quite a few similarities - many words are identical. However, the sound of the two languages is totally different.
I can understand a little Portuguese and I'm gonna learn this language.
Posso entender um pouco de Português e vou a aprender este idioma.
It's not difficult for European people to learn another European languages because of their similarities.
Lithuanian language is maybe much similar to Russian and Ukrainian, isn't it?
I've heard Portuguese people can understand Spanish well enough but not the other way around.
Never heard of Lithuanian and Sanskrit, I can't understand how could happen lol.
I studied Latin and French before starting Spanish (I've also had a lot of exposure to "Latinate" English) and these certainly helped me in learning Spanish. I then studied more French (which was made easier by my experience with Spanish). This was followed by more French (helped by my improved knowledge of Spanish). I can often get the "drift" of Italian (although my exposure has been mostly limited to movies and restaurants).
While visiting Chile, I ended up on a tour bus with (mostly) Brazilians and ate lunch with one who discussed his stomach "stapling" operation (not what I would have considered to be your "everyday" topic). Nonetheless he spoke mostly in Brazilian Portuguese (I have since heard that there are many differences between the Portuguese from Brazil and that of Portugal) and I spoke Spanish and, occasionally we reverted to English for some specific word.
Some suggest that Arabic heavily influenced Spanish (I have heard it suggested that up to 30% of Spanish vocabulary derives from Arabic). I am more inclined to put the figure at 5%. At any rate, when studying Arabic, I found a knowledge of Spanish to be of very little help (except for being familiar with "In'shallah" (because everyone points out that this is the origin of "ójala").
When studying (classical) Greek, a familiarity with highly inflected languages (e.g. Romance languages) was helpful as was an acquaintance with "literary" English).
When studying Vietnamese, Chinese and Japanese, none of my previous experiences was directly useful, except to the extent that I had learned that "different languages are, indeed, different".
In my experience, the most important benefit (and what should be the first lesson learned) is "There is no right/natural way to express something." The best choice is, in most cases, "culturally dependent" (often dependent on a "sub-culture"). Effective communication requires a meeting on some "common" ground. When one insists that "my way is the only way to express some thought", (to give the "kindest" interpretation), one is guilty of "cultural imperialism".
Actually, I've heard that Italian is the closest language to Spanish. Anyone?
