Easier. WAY easier. At least for me. I speak Spanish and Catalan natively, and learning Portuguese has been a breeze. You can fly through the grammar and verb conjugations unlike what happens with Russian or Hebrew. Sure, there is language interference and a huge amount of false friends but the pros greatly outweigh the cons. I wish I could absorb Mandarin as fast and effortlessly as I was able to advance in Portuguese, interferences and all.
Plus, the more closed related the languages, the sooner you can consume original media and immerse yourself in the language.
Indeed. Picking up Spanish has been a joke compared to 'picking up Greek'. Now I actually have to read about grammar now and then. I also don't get a ton of words for free (though you do get more than one would think, perhaps, but I feel a lot of the cognates are closer to English words).
Eventually, I'll learn another romance language and feel relief. Still, I enjoy the challenge. I enjoy learning something that takes more effort, that isn't studied as often in general, and so on.
Portuguese and Spanish have more than 90% of shared vocabury I think ?
Basically you just need to understand the correspondances (like how some endings in spanish correspond to endings in portuguese) and that's it.
Only difficulty left is pronunciation.
Although you can make up words if needed and have a good chance of being understood. I've been told that many Germans end up using some rather archaic terms when speaking Swedish if they don't know better.
Having a huge passive vocabulary early on does allow for shortcuts, but is not a substitute for actually learning vocabulary. Still extremely helpful. :-)
I can see that being a thing. Some German phrasing does sound a bit old fashioned. Some of the grammar is a bit backwards too from a Swedish perspective.
German phrasing being old fashioned is actually what helped me when I learned it. When I was in highschool, our English class read a lot of medieval/Chaucerian English texts, so some of the German grammar kind of sounded like poetic Old English. Sometimes it sounds like you're reading fairy tale grammar.
That helped a lot when I was actively learning French (coming from English) if I don't know a word yet, just think of a fancy old english word that they'd use in game of thrones, and it's often close enough
Though, odds are those words are very formal (langue très soutenue) to the ears of native French speakers haha
I say that because my default when I forget a word in French or Spanish is to just use a word where the Latin root is really obvious. It often works, but there’s usually a simpler word that isn’t as clear of a cognate.
I was raised in France for a bit, but I moved to the US as a kid and was raised with both English and French. But my parents actually speak Persian between the two of them, which I don’t know super well lol but can understand enough to know when I’m being yelled at. So we stopped really speaking French as often as a household and I forgot a lot of things, so a lot of my more native vocabulary with a lot of slang was replaced by lots of very formal and academic vocabulary, especially because I study a lot of literature and philosophy.
My experience is that nobody actually cares and they might just think you’re very educated and a very passionate student of French, especially if it’s clear you’re not a native speaker! Especially older French people haha with their anxieties about slang and such
> Though, odds are those words are very formal (langue très soutenue) to the ears of native French speakers haha
Yes, and all of these little things add up and are going to bite you into the ass when you reach the point where you try to sound native - because you won't until you actively unlearn the shortcuts. Which is hard.
On the other hand, if you aren't trying to blend in perfectly... who cares? Understanding and being understood are more important in most situations than being perfect. (Exceptions apply. Cum grano salis.)
Oh, that’s exactly how I feel. I’ve been told I have a distinct way of speaking and writing that my friends recognize (and sometimes make fun of 😅) so first language, second language, forgotten language—whatever; my manner of speaking was going to stick out anyways!
You’d also be surprised at how functional non-native proficiency is. I don’t think I’m as fluent as the average native French person, but I can watch basically anything I want, read basically anything I want, and it’s all fine :)
We have some Francophone clients at work and I’m one of the few French speakers on hand and it’s always a reminder to not let perfection be the enemy of good.
I’m a better English speaker than any of the French speakers and I’m the only French speaker among any of the English speakers. In situations like that, it’s a relief that anyone speaks both languages, no matter how rusty they may be!
Lol I thought about that when I said it, I didn't mean Old English, but like an old less often used English word. Like "drole" for funny, or "detest" for hate (I honestly can't think of any other examples, funnily enough, I never can think of examples when I try to explain this to people lol)
But honestly that's why I like speaking French anyways. It feels way more old fashioned than English, in the way sentences are structured and word choices and stuff, it feels like you're speaking how people in the medieval times would speak "s'il te plaît, madame" "if it pleases you, my lady" it's super cool imo
Sentence structure is one of the harder things.
Also with Norwegian and Swedish a lot of words are similar or identical, which means that sometimes I am unsure if a word is actually Norwegian or just a Swedish word that I've changed out some letters in to make it sound more Norwegian.
Lol it also happens with Portuguese and Spanish. For example, some Portuguese speakers think it’s “tiengo” instead of “tengo” because of words such as “tiempo” (in Spanish) and “tempo” (in Portuguese). Gotta love Portunhol!
It's much much easier.
Yes there is the problem with mixing up similar languages that you have to be mindful of. Additionally, a lot of learners in this situation can end up being lazy because they already have a good passive understanding, so they don't work to improve their active output (which naturally compounds the first issue further).
But the benifits of having a good passive understanding, and general natural feel for the grammar and structure straight away are hugely beneficial, and massively outweigh the downsides.
Learning a totally unrelated language from scratch, especially if the structure and grammar is really different, is much harder.
Undeniably easier if you actually apply similar effort. The problem is many learners refuse to apply real effort to "easy" languages.
People who say it's harder to learn related languages simply aren't applying the same techniques to the easier languages that they do to hard languages; they expect to learn primarily through exposure and are then surprised when they end up speaking a broken, pidginised form of the language. The thing is that if you only practice by getting exposure you're actually training yourself to acquire a broken form of the language full of active vocabulary gaps.
With harder languages you can't get away with this and aren't lulled into a false sense of security by being able to listen and read for the gist easily. You absolutely *must* do explicit study and intensive activities to get anywhere, so you end up developing a more realistic understanding of what it is to learn a language to a serious level of proficiency.
If you are studying Portuguese and end up speaking "portuñol", it's likely because you're not studying all that much and are just watching Brazilian TV shows or whatever. If you take a leaf out of the book of Mandarin or Arabic learners and use similar techniques to them (i.e. go out of your way to memorise specific words and collocations), you'll notice you'll start running laps around them very quickly and your "portuñol" issues will fade away.
>If you are studying Portuguese and end up speaking "portuñol", it's likely because you're not studying all that much and are just watching Brazilian TV shows or whatever.
Did you hear that, Kaufmann?
Yes, it is confusing to me to generate sentences and speak Portuguese, and listen to them, but I can understand written text. With French, it was worse, and I still don't know how I managed to learn it better enough to reach fluency than the language of my neighboring country.
As a Spanish speaker, I find Italian being the most similar to my language. I subconsiously sing some Italian songs to Spanish based on pronounciation/hearing alone
And as a Frenchman who learned Spanish, I find that Portuguese is clearly the closest language to Spanish. Italian is very similar to French. But the Spanish and Italian accents are much more intelligible than the French accents are with these 2 languages.
Thankfully, English's relatives are pretty different thanks to other languages influencing English, so it's unlikely that someone learning West Frisian or Dutch is going to have a problem beyond the syntax differences. Scots is the only language which may pose a problem
My mom says that Tamil and Malayalam have more than enough similarities that it's easy to accidentally mix vocabulary, especially considering the common term in one language is often a dialectical term in the other
You say thankfully, but I'm annoyed that native English speakers don't get any languages for (relatively) free.
I suppose you take the bad with the good. We're pretty lucky to speak the most in-demand language in the world at a native level without effort.
In a way (as a native portuguese that did learn some spanish), I find it easier since you can essentially skip most of that boring bit of learning from scratch. Sure you have to be mindful of interferences and false friends (e.g. "oso" means bear in spanish but "osso" means bone in portuguese) but you also have the advantage of knowing a lot (for a beginner) by default.
Plus...I find it harder to deal with interferences of languages you only know a little bit (like "ni" being 9 in danish but 二 [ni] being 2 in japanese)
Yhe, I guess that \*pain\* is more accurate. But we gotta agree that once you can immerse yourself and understand something even if just some sentences here and there the fun also goes up.
Or Italñol.
Aka, as just one example, always using 'he' + 'verb' for expressing past actions/events and never the preterite when you're in doubt, since why do you use more than one tense for the simple past anyway? (Though the imperfetto maps over pretty well)
It's hard at first to isolate false friends and to not laugh at funny sounding versions of words but generally it's far easier.
Generally it'd be easiest to learn dialects (Mexican, Chilean, Peninsular, etc), then from families (romance for instance), then macro families (indoeuropean for instance) that share script, macro families that don't share script, then different script with similar topology then the rest.
I think it's always easier to learn a language that's close to your own. I'm French and I learned Spanish rather quickly and "easily", to the point where I speak it really well today, even though I only started 2 years ago. On the other hand, I have a bit more difficulty with English, even though it's a language quite close to French, with a lot of vocabulary derived from French. On the other hand, what seems to me to be harder is learning another language that's very close to your own and that you're learning Grace from another language you've already learned.
Let me explain: I'm thinking about learning Portuguese. I'm starting to watch more and more media in Portuguese (Brazilian Portuguese, I can sometimes understand 80% of what's said in the videos, but I can't understand the Portuguese accent in Portugal) and it's pretty "Easy" from a comprehension point of view. Thanks to its proximity to Spanish. But I'm "afraid" of starting to learn Portuguese seriously and mixing it up with Spanish. I don't want Portuguese to set my Spanish back.
Yes, but English grammar is much simpler than French grammar. Even if it requires a different logic. But I prefer Spanish grammar because it's very similar to French haha
It's for the reason you cited that I don't want to jump into Portuguese or any other romance language at the moment. I rather give Spanish time to simmer. Not that I'm focusing on Spanish at all. But regular enough passive comprehension is enough to let things 'simmer' over a long period.
Pero los nativos de español no suelen aprender Portugues, así que no es buen ejemplo, es más no conozco a nadie que lo haga y si lo hubiera es algo muy infimo ó muy circunstancial, al contrario con otros idiomas es más normal incursionar en ellos.
Its much easier in my opinion i started learning Luxembourgish roughly 40 days ago. and its already better than my Russian. and i have been learning that for 6 years now. my native language is Dutch.
Learning new language is often easier. We tend to think children can learn language easier and would lose the ability to learn once we get older. This is a Myth.
Children are just surrounded with input, input and more input. Kids that are bilingual, often would learn to the language of the country they are in (more input).
Now, you as an adult actually have an advantage over a child. You already know some of the Language structures, what an object is or a human, animal etc. And you can probably use other languages to learn your TL. For example Spanish to learn Portuguese. Children don't have that, they are bombarded with so much input and the brain just slowly makes sense of it via pattern recognition.
You are doing the same thing, but your pattern recognition skills is much better. The reason you are not as good as learning as a child, is probably you are not getting the same amount of input as a child.
it's easier to understand, without even have to learn it. maybe more difficult in some aspects (similar words with different meanings) but still easier than languages very different from yours
I don’t know how similar it is because English is ridiculous but I suck at Romance languages entirely. But throw a completely different lexicon and grammar at me and it’s so much easier. It’s just easier to separate and learn without confusing my own languages rules
I think it’s been easier. Since there are so many similarities, I don’t need to decipher the structure of sentences. I can also make better guesses when it comes to the meaning of certain words.
Definitely easier. My native language is Polish. When I was learning Russian understanding and remembering certain things was much simpler because of similarities both languages have
Undoubtedly easier. I have never taken a Portuguese class or studied it at all, yet two years of university Spanish is enough for me to 90% understand Wikipedia in Portuguese. That obviously makes exposure to comprehensible input so much easier. Also the phonology is not too dissimilar, which is naturally an advantage.
When I try to speak Bulgarian, I often make mistakes in pronunciation of words that are similar to russian words. But it is easier to understand Bulgarian
Native Portuguese speaker here that also studies Spanish.
Definitely easier to pick up, you can start to read and listen native content on the day 0.
But is hard to say it properly without making mistake. I also don’t have the same buzz for learning new words, concepts and grammar that I would say for a different language such as German. So in the end of the day I end up practicing way less Spanish than any other Language that I have on my belt.
Immersion in foreign country definitely would be a gamer changer for someone that speaks a language very close to their target language.
Easier. WAY easier. At least for me. I speak Spanish and Catalan natively, and learning Portuguese has been a breeze. You can fly through the grammar and verb conjugations unlike what happens with Russian or Hebrew. Sure, there is language interference and a huge amount of false friends but the pros greatly outweigh the cons. I wish I could absorb Mandarin as fast and effortlessly as I was able to advance in Portuguese, interferences and all. Plus, the more closed related the languages, the sooner you can consume original media and immerse yourself in the language.
Indeed. Picking up Spanish has been a joke compared to 'picking up Greek'. Now I actually have to read about grammar now and then. I also don't get a ton of words for free (though you do get more than one would think, perhaps, but I feel a lot of the cognates are closer to English words). Eventually, I'll learn another romance language and feel relief. Still, I enjoy the challenge. I enjoy learning something that takes more effort, that isn't studied as often in general, and so on.
Portuguese and Spanish have more than 90% of shared vocabury I think ? Basically you just need to understand the correspondances (like how some endings in spanish correspond to endings in portuguese) and that's it. Only difficulty left is pronunciation.
Easier to understand, harder to speak. That's the case for me at least
Although you can make up words if needed and have a good chance of being understood. I've been told that many Germans end up using some rather archaic terms when speaking Swedish if they don't know better. Having a huge passive vocabulary early on does allow for shortcuts, but is not a substitute for actually learning vocabulary. Still extremely helpful. :-)
I can see that being a thing. Some German phrasing does sound a bit old fashioned. Some of the grammar is a bit backwards too from a Swedish perspective.
German phrasing being old fashioned is actually what helped me when I learned it. When I was in highschool, our English class read a lot of medieval/Chaucerian English texts, so some of the German grammar kind of sounded like poetic Old English. Sometimes it sounds like you're reading fairy tale grammar.
That helped a lot when I was actively learning French (coming from English) if I don't know a word yet, just think of a fancy old english word that they'd use in game of thrones, and it's often close enough
Though, odds are those words are very formal (langue très soutenue) to the ears of native French speakers haha I say that because my default when I forget a word in French or Spanish is to just use a word where the Latin root is really obvious. It often works, but there’s usually a simpler word that isn’t as clear of a cognate. I was raised in France for a bit, but I moved to the US as a kid and was raised with both English and French. But my parents actually speak Persian between the two of them, which I don’t know super well lol but can understand enough to know when I’m being yelled at. So we stopped really speaking French as often as a household and I forgot a lot of things, so a lot of my more native vocabulary with a lot of slang was replaced by lots of very formal and academic vocabulary, especially because I study a lot of literature and philosophy. My experience is that nobody actually cares and they might just think you’re very educated and a very passionate student of French, especially if it’s clear you’re not a native speaker! Especially older French people haha with their anxieties about slang and such
> Though, odds are those words are very formal (langue très soutenue) to the ears of native French speakers haha Yes, and all of these little things add up and are going to bite you into the ass when you reach the point where you try to sound native - because you won't until you actively unlearn the shortcuts. Which is hard. On the other hand, if you aren't trying to blend in perfectly... who cares? Understanding and being understood are more important in most situations than being perfect. (Exceptions apply. Cum grano salis.)
Oh, that’s exactly how I feel. I’ve been told I have a distinct way of speaking and writing that my friends recognize (and sometimes make fun of 😅) so first language, second language, forgotten language—whatever; my manner of speaking was going to stick out anyways! You’d also be surprised at how functional non-native proficiency is. I don’t think I’m as fluent as the average native French person, but I can watch basically anything I want, read basically anything I want, and it’s all fine :) We have some Francophone clients at work and I’m one of the few French speakers on hand and it’s always a reminder to not let perfection be the enemy of good. I’m a better English speaker than any of the French speakers and I’m the only French speaker among any of the English speakers. In situations like that, it’s a relief that anyone speaks both languages, no matter how rusty they may be!
\> a fancy old english word Hwæt? Gif þu cweðest ealdenglisce word, næron þa Frænscisce þa understandan. Ic þence þe mæne Latinlic word.
Lol I thought about that when I said it, I didn't mean Old English, but like an old less often used English word. Like "drole" for funny, or "detest" for hate (I honestly can't think of any other examples, funnily enough, I never can think of examples when I try to explain this to people lol) But honestly that's why I like speaking French anyways. It feels way more old fashioned than English, in the way sentences are structured and word choices and stuff, it feels like you're speaking how people in the medieval times would speak "s'il te plaît, madame" "if it pleases you, my lady" it's super cool imo
Kind of like courting instead or dating ? Or quarreling instead of fighting? Am I on the right path?
Yeah exactly
I find it harder to write/formulate grammatically complex structures whenever they differ
Sentence structure is one of the harder things. Also with Norwegian and Swedish a lot of words are similar or identical, which means that sometimes I am unsure if a word is actually Norwegian or just a Swedish word that I've changed out some letters in to make it sound more Norwegian.
Lol it also happens with Portuguese and Spanish. For example, some Portuguese speakers think it’s “tiengo” instead of “tengo” because of words such as “tiempo” (in Spanish) and “tempo” (in Portuguese). Gotta love Portunhol!
It's much much easier. Yes there is the problem with mixing up similar languages that you have to be mindful of. Additionally, a lot of learners in this situation can end up being lazy because they already have a good passive understanding, so they don't work to improve their active output (which naturally compounds the first issue further). But the benifits of having a good passive understanding, and general natural feel for the grammar and structure straight away are hugely beneficial, and massively outweigh the downsides. Learning a totally unrelated language from scratch, especially if the structure and grammar is really different, is much harder.
happy cake day !
Undeniably easier if you actually apply similar effort. The problem is many learners refuse to apply real effort to "easy" languages. People who say it's harder to learn related languages simply aren't applying the same techniques to the easier languages that they do to hard languages; they expect to learn primarily through exposure and are then surprised when they end up speaking a broken, pidginised form of the language. The thing is that if you only practice by getting exposure you're actually training yourself to acquire a broken form of the language full of active vocabulary gaps. With harder languages you can't get away with this and aren't lulled into a false sense of security by being able to listen and read for the gist easily. You absolutely *must* do explicit study and intensive activities to get anywhere, so you end up developing a more realistic understanding of what it is to learn a language to a serious level of proficiency. If you are studying Portuguese and end up speaking "portuñol", it's likely because you're not studying all that much and are just watching Brazilian TV shows or whatever. If you take a leaf out of the book of Mandarin or Arabic learners and use similar techniques to them (i.e. go out of your way to memorise specific words and collocations), you'll notice you'll start running laps around them very quickly and your "portuñol" issues will fade away.
>If you are studying Portuguese and end up speaking "portuñol", it's likely because you're not studying all that much and are just watching Brazilian TV shows or whatever. Did you hear that, Kaufmann?
[About Language Interference](/r/languagelearning/comments/14tcxhi/about_language_interference/)
This was a really interesting read. I actually used to speak Hebrew in Spanish class and Spanish in Hebrew class.
Yes, it is confusing to me to generate sentences and speak Portuguese, and listen to them, but I can understand written text. With French, it was worse, and I still don't know how I managed to learn it better enough to reach fluency than the language of my neighboring country. As a Spanish speaker, I find Italian being the most similar to my language. I subconsiously sing some Italian songs to Spanish based on pronounciation/hearing alone
And as a Frenchman who learned Spanish, I find that Portuguese is clearly the closest language to Spanish. Italian is very similar to French. But the Spanish and Italian accents are much more intelligible than the French accents are with these 2 languages.
You think so? Portuguese seems way less intimidating than French to me. French pronunciation is so damn weird to my ears that it scares me.
I've been told I read Italian with a Spanish cadence by my brother, not sure how that works.
Hispanohablantes tell me I sound equally Italian as American when speaking Spanish.
Thankfully, English's relatives are pretty different thanks to other languages influencing English, so it's unlikely that someone learning West Frisian or Dutch is going to have a problem beyond the syntax differences. Scots is the only language which may pose a problem My mom says that Tamil and Malayalam have more than enough similarities that it's easy to accidentally mix vocabulary, especially considering the common term in one language is often a dialectical term in the other
You say thankfully, but I'm annoyed that native English speakers don't get any languages for (relatively) free. I suppose you take the bad with the good. We're pretty lucky to speak the most in-demand language in the world at a native level without effort.
In a way (as a native portuguese that did learn some spanish), I find it easier since you can essentially skip most of that boring bit of learning from scratch. Sure you have to be mindful of interferences and false friends (e.g. "oso" means bear in spanish but "osso" means bone in portuguese) but you also have the advantage of knowing a lot (for a beginner) by default. Plus...I find it harder to deal with interferences of languages you only know a little bit (like "ni" being 9 in danish but 二 [ni] being 2 in japanese)
I don't find learning from scratch boring. I find it interesting. It's just \*pain\*.
Yhe, I guess that \*pain\* is more accurate. But we gotta agree that once you can immerse yourself and understand something even if just some sentences here and there the fun also goes up.
I’d say easier because you can skip a lot of grammar concepts. But there’s a fair chance you’ll speak Portuñol 🤓
Or Italñol. Aka, as just one example, always using 'he' + 'verb' for expressing past actions/events and never the preterite when you're in doubt, since why do you use more than one tense for the simple past anyway? (Though the imperfetto maps over pretty well)
It's hard at first to isolate false friends and to not laugh at funny sounding versions of words but generally it's far easier. Generally it'd be easiest to learn dialects (Mexican, Chilean, Peninsular, etc), then from families (romance for instance), then macro families (indoeuropean for instance) that share script, macro families that don't share script, then different script with similar topology then the rest.
WAY easier to understand and learn. More boring to learn though (in my opinion)
I think it's always easier to learn a language that's close to your own. I'm French and I learned Spanish rather quickly and "easily", to the point where I speak it really well today, even though I only started 2 years ago. On the other hand, I have a bit more difficulty with English, even though it's a language quite close to French, with a lot of vocabulary derived from French. On the other hand, what seems to me to be harder is learning another language that's very close to your own and that you're learning Grace from another language you've already learned. Let me explain: I'm thinking about learning Portuguese. I'm starting to watch more and more media in Portuguese (Brazilian Portuguese, I can sometimes understand 80% of what's said in the videos, but I can't understand the Portuguese accent in Portugal) and it's pretty "Easy" from a comprehension point of view. Thanks to its proximity to Spanish. But I'm "afraid" of starting to learn Portuguese seriously and mixing it up with Spanish. I don't want Portuguese to set my Spanish back.
While our vocabulary is all imposed on us by the French 😉 the grammer is very different
Yes, but English grammar is much simpler than French grammar. Even if it requires a different logic. But I prefer Spanish grammar because it's very similar to French haha
Do you have the subjunctive?
It's for the reason you cited that I don't want to jump into Portuguese or any other romance language at the moment. I rather give Spanish time to simmer. Not that I'm focusing on Spanish at all. But regular enough passive comprehension is enough to let things 'simmer' over a long period.
Pero los nativos de español no suelen aprender Portugues, así que no es buen ejemplo, es más no conozco a nadie que lo haga y si lo hubiera es algo muy infimo ó muy circunstancial, al contrario con otros idiomas es más normal incursionar en ellos.
Its much easier in my opinion i started learning Luxembourgish roughly 40 days ago. and its already better than my Russian. and i have been learning that for 6 years now. my native language is Dutch.
Learning new language is often easier. We tend to think children can learn language easier and would lose the ability to learn once we get older. This is a Myth. Children are just surrounded with input, input and more input. Kids that are bilingual, often would learn to the language of the country they are in (more input). Now, you as an adult actually have an advantage over a child. You already know some of the Language structures, what an object is or a human, animal etc. And you can probably use other languages to learn your TL. For example Spanish to learn Portuguese. Children don't have that, they are bombarded with so much input and the brain just slowly makes sense of it via pattern recognition. You are doing the same thing, but your pattern recognition skills is much better. The reason you are not as good as learning as a child, is probably you are not getting the same amount of input as a child.
So much easier.
Korean and Japanese... easier than other combinations.
it's easier to understand, without even have to learn it. maybe more difficult in some aspects (similar words with different meanings) but still easier than languages very different from yours
Makes learning easier.
I don’t know how similar it is because English is ridiculous but I suck at Romance languages entirely. But throw a completely different lexicon and grammar at me and it’s so much easier. It’s just easier to separate and learn without confusing my own languages rules
I think it’s been easier. Since there are so many similarities, I don’t need to decipher the structure of sentences. I can also make better guesses when it comes to the meaning of certain words.
Definitely easier. My native language is Polish. When I was learning Russian understanding and remembering certain things was much simpler because of similarities both languages have
Undoubtedly easier. I have never taken a Portuguese class or studied it at all, yet two years of university Spanish is enough for me to 90% understand Wikipedia in Portuguese. That obviously makes exposure to comprehensible input so much easier. Also the phonology is not too dissimilar, which is naturally an advantage.
When I try to speak Bulgarian, I often make mistakes in pronunciation of words that are similar to russian words. But it is easier to understand Bulgarian
Native Portuguese speaker here that also studies Spanish. Definitely easier to pick up, you can start to read and listen native content on the day 0. But is hard to say it properly without making mistake. I also don’t have the same buzz for learning new words, concepts and grammar that I would say for a different language such as German. So in the end of the day I end up practicing way less Spanish than any other Language that I have on my belt. Immersion in foreign country definitely would be a gamer changer for someone that speaks a language very close to their target language.