Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

Re:Raising a Truly Bilingual Child by barry-cotter on Saturday July 22, 2017 @06:45PM (#14829853)

You were closer to being right than joeyspn. Portuguese, Spanish and Italian are more or less mutually intelligible. There's a lot of complex vocabulary and grammar that's different and plenty of simple stuff too but if you speak slowly you can communicate on day 0. French is further from mutual intelligibility but you still have an enormous leg up learning it if you speak any Western Romance language. Catalan is probably more similar to French than Spanish but it's still pretty easy for a Hispanophone to learn.

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Re:Raising a Truly Bilingual Child by jaclaz on Sunday July 23, 2017 @10:41AM (#14832447)

>Portuguese, Spanish and Italian are more or less mutually intelligible.

And Romanian, with only some more difficulty.

The big problems I see (as an Italian) when speaking with people from France, Spain, Portugal and Romania is mostly about the pronounciation, admittedly I have studied a little bit of French (that makes the "slightly more distant" language on par with the others).

When it is written, I can usually understand like 90% or more of most text and there are "sinergies", i.e. there is a given word that is different from Italian but is very similar to another word in another of the Latin languages or that is actually directly or almost directly a Latin word.

The issue is with "false pairs", i.e.words that exist (or sound alike or almost alike) in two languages but that have completely different meanings.

Like, to mention a couple reknown ones, "burro" which is "butter" in Italian and "donkey/ass" in Spanish or the Spanish "aceite" which most Italians will instinctively translate into "aceto" (vinegar) while it means "oil".

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