As an American who can read basic Spanish and understand spoken Spanish (insofar as I understand the words being spoken), I concur. Written Portuguese is reasonable. Spoken Portuguese is a black box.

This is really surprising, Portuguese is pretty close to Spanish (it is derived directly from Spanish) so other than the nasal vowels it tracks pretty close to it, it also has a considerable vocabulary of words that sound pretty close to their Italian counterparts.

I've never heard an Italian or Spanish person say they can't understand anything in a spoken Portuguese conversation.

Italians and Spaniards should have an easy time understanding at least some Brazilian portuguese. European Portuguese is _really_ hard, though, because our vowels are all sorts of weird. When I moved to London, it really struck me how people speaking Russian sounded to me like they were speaking Portuguese, which always forced a double take when I tried to “tune in” and realised it wasn’t my own language.

He he. That's partly why we make fun of you as the most Western Eastern European country.

Developing economy, speaking with a strong Slavic accent, recovering after a long dictatorship, you check many boxes :-p

I'd never heard that one, that's amazing. Who's the "we" you speak of?

Must be Spaniards.

I worked with someone from Romania. He said Portuguese sounds just like Romanian until you try to understand it, then it sounds like someone making fun of Romanian.

I'm actually Romanian and I can confirm that. Portuguese is Romanian background noise at a party :-p

Oh yeah, I wonder why PT-PT is so different in terms of pronunciation, it would make sense for Brazil to move in a different direction given the waves of immigration and how insular it is in South America and Portugal to stay closer to Spanish/Gallego given how close they are there.

Portuguese (at least the one from Portugal) has 9 vowel phonemes, compared to 5 for spanish. If you count the nasals it's 14. And you can add some additional vowel richness in diphthongs.

It's very very varied phonetically when compared to the neighboring Spanish, which IIRC underwent considerable simplification at in the 16th century with unification of Spain.

I've heard many French and Spanish native speakers expressing the difficulty to understand it.

Source: Portuguese native speaker with decades-long immersion in Spanish and French-speaking communities.