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As for the other romance languages I am best at Spanish but I have taken courses and have had lots of exposure so it doesn't really count, as I can actually speak it reasonably well. (Though it was very easy to learn I found.)
But going in "cold" without prior knowledge or exposure for any of them, it seems to me that Italian would be the closest and most intuitive for a French speaker.
Spanish would probably be the next easiest.
Then it's a toss-up between Portuguese and Romanian. I can decipher them when written but as far as understanding orally, I think Romanian actually might be slightly easier. I've watched movies in Romanian with subtitles and at some points I can even follow part of the dialogue without the captions.
Whereas Portuguese is more difficult for me, and I find that even my Spanish doesn't help me much in understanding it.
Oddly enough in the other "direction", Portuguese speakers I know report that it is very easy for them to understand Spanish.
I wonder how Catalan would fit in between these languages? What I heard is that it's somehow a bridge language between French and Spanish.
In that case, a Catalan speaker would be able to understand French (and some Occitan?) better than a Spanish, and given that most Catalans speak Spanish, they probably understand Italian to some degree too? This would be cool.
There was a Spanish guy from Madrid I came across who told me "Catalan is like a dialect of Spanish, I can pretty much understand it and they speak Spanish too, they ARE Spanish" but I didn't really buy it, it sounded too political..haha
What I heard is that it's somehow a bridge language between French and Spanish.
It is an independent language. Derives from Latin and therefore has a lot in common with Spanish and French, but it is not a bridge between those two languages.
Quote:
Originally Posted by fps7028
In that case, a Catalan speaker would be able to understand French (and some Occitan?) better than a Spanish,
Written French yes, but not spoken French.
Catalan is one of my two native languages and I also took French in high school in a school where most students only had Spanish as their native language, and while compared to my classmates I had some advantage with the grammar, the vocabulary and reading texts, in speaking or listening we were at the same level, zero.
A Catalan speaker needs an introduction or a knowledge base of French to understand the language, like Spanish speakers.
Quote:
Originally Posted by fps7028
and given that most Catalans speak Spanish, they probably understand Italian to some degree too? This would be cool.
Well, many people overestimate the mutual intelligibility between Italian and Spanish, or Catalan in this case, is not that they can understand each other without having before an introduction to the language.
Quote:
Originally Posted by fps7028
There was a Spanish guy from Madrid I came across who told me "Catalan is like a dialect of Spanish, I can pretty much understand it and they speak Spanish too, they ARE Spanish" but I didn't really buy it, it sounded too political..haha
It's not a Spanish dialect, actually, Catalan is older than Spanish, but are really similar, much more than Spanish to Italian, or Spanish to Portuguese or Catalan to French.
An average Spanish speaker can understand Catalan perfectly, better than any other language, and most of Catalonia's citizens are bilingual and speak Catalan and Spanish.
I wonder how Catalan would fit in between these languages? What I heard is that it's somehow a bridge language between French and Spanish.
In that case, a Catalan speaker would be able to understand French (and some Occitan?) better than a Spanish, and given that most Catalans speak Spanish, they probably understand Italian to some degree too? This would be cool.
There was a Spanish guy from Madrid I came across who told me "Catalan is like a dialect of Spanish, I can pretty much understand it and they speak Spanish too, they ARE Spanish" but I didn't really buy it, it sounded too political..haha
I believe as others have said that Catalan is classified as a language as opposed to a dialect of Spanish.
That said I do know that in Spain people generally don't refer to what we foreigners call the Spanish language as "Espanol", but rather they call it "Castellano". The reason for this is also somewhat political, in that other languages like Catalan, Basque, Galician, etc. are also "Spanish" languages, and so according to that train of thought there is no single Spanish language, any more than there is a Swiss, Canadian or Belgian language.
Romanian I imagine must have A LOT of Slavic influence..It must be like a mix of slavic and romance even though it's classified as a romance language.
Why don't you make a little research instead of coming with your suppositions? The Slavic influence in Romanian is not higher than Engli8sh influence in French.
And to answer the thread's question, for Romanians (who don't know the respective languages) Italian is the easiest to understand, followed perhaps by panish among the non-educated and by French among educated, because Romania was quite influenced by France in 19th century.
But I think that for the other Romance people, Romanian is the hardest to understand.
Is Walloon (the language, not the dialect), Swiss French, Cajun French and Quebec French mutually intelligible with Standard French? I heard somewhere that Quebec French is more different from Standard French than Afrikaans is to Dutch.
As for the other romance languages I am best at Spanish but I have taken courses and have had lots of exposure so it doesn't really count, as I can actually speak it reasonably well. (Though it was very easy to learn I found.)
But going in "cold" without prior knowledge or exposure for any of them, it seems to me that Italian would be the closest and most intuitive for a French speaker.
Spanish would probably be the next easiest.
Then it's a toss-up between Portuguese and Romanian. I can decipher them when written but as far as understanding orally, I think Romanian actually might be slightly easier. I've watched movies in Romanian with subtitles and at some points I can even follow part of the dialogue without the captions.
Whereas Portuguese is more difficult for me, and I find that even my Spanish doesn't help me much in understanding it.
Oddly enough in the other "direction", Portuguese speakers I know report that it is very easy for them to understand Spanish.
That is very strange. How can a French understands better Romanian than Portuguese since Portuguese are French are not that distant? Romanian belongs to a different group of romance.
The influences between all western romance languages are very old, remember that the first Portuguese king is half French and the 5th one spend much of his youth in France and was actually a Count of Boulogne. So at least at the highest level, i think there always was some sort of influences between the Galician-Portuguese and some form of langue d'oil.
It's easy for a Portuguese to understand Spanish and French, but it's always necessary some kind of introduction.
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By the way, i just saw you're not French... my mistake, sorry.
Even so, my point stands: there always was a close proximity with the western romance languages, at least at the highest level. Despite what we might think, western European regions were not "that" closed in their own worlds.
Last edited by Tagus Crows; 11-18-2013 at 12:45 PM..
^^ So the Romanian word for yes, da, has nothing to do with Slavic languages?
Some could challenge that otherwise as well. Seems impossible that the Romanian language would be a monolith without any neighboring influences.
I didn't say it doesn't have Slavic influences. I'm saying that is not a Slavic language with Latin influences as the dude claimed but the other way around.
You have a collection of titles and links in the footnotes of the Wikipedia article.
Last edited by Rozenn; 11-19-2013 at 04:58 PM..
Reason: Unnecessary
Is Walloon (the language, not the dialect), Swiss French, Cajun French and Quebec French mutually intelligible with Standard French? I heard somewhere that Quebec French is more different from Standard French than Afrikaans is to Dutch.
The page you posted in Walloon is not French at all. But Belgian French, Swiss French and Quebec French are all basically the same in their written form. Cajun French is rarely written - if people in Louisiana write in French they use the same French as the rest of us.
The differences with Quebec French vs. France French are more like Flemish vs. Dutch, or American English vs. UK English.
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