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That is certainly a very interesting and colorful way of explaining your own personal experience of Portuguese! Obviously, Portuguese "forc[ing] your brain to work faster and better" depends on where you are coming from.
As you allude to, the only time you are going to hear the mesoclitic pronouns (inserted in future and conditional tenses between the stem and the personal endings) is in very formal speech. It is also extremely rare to hear native speakers use the fused indirect and direct objects in normal everyday speech. In fact, if you spend any considerable amount of time in Portugal, you will notice that particularly 3rd person direct object pronouns are avoided altogether, e.g. Q: "Acabaste o trabalho?" 'Have you already finished the job?"; A: "Acabei ontem" 'I finished [it] yesterday".
I am German, Germans speak more slowly and clearly, thus I can really wait to hear what someone says to me. With Portuguese I am forced to kind of anticipate what someone will likely say to me. I noticed on several occasions when someone unexpectedly started to talk to me, i.e. when I had no clue what it was about. Within a conversation it is much easier for me to understand Portuguese because my mind can narrow down what the person will reply.
Yes, of course most people speak simplified Portuguese, there are many things in my grammar book that I have never heard in real life here.
In my opinion, spoken Portuguese does not sound like a Romance language at all, but something similar to how Russian sounds except of course none of the vocabulary matches.
Romance languages do indeed have a way to be mutually intelligible. Today's romance languages descend from Latin all of which are part of the Italic branch in linguistics. For instance Italian and French have a 89% lexical similarity (meaning their vocabulary resembles each others nearly 89%). These 2 are indeed the closest amongst the romance languages.
It is true however that many people say Spanish is closer to Italian but that is due to the accent one perceives rather than the actual vocabulary. France as you may know used to been known to the Romans as Gaul and latin was spoken there. The Franks (hence France) were a Germanic tribe which took over France and in doing so they greatly changed the way French is pronounced. However have a look:
French: parler, mettre, sentir, prendre, poser, traduire, attendre,
Italian: parlare, mettere,sentire,prendere,posare,tradurre, attendere,
Spanish: hablar, poner, sentir, tomar, plantear, traducir, esperar,
I tried to line up the words the best I could, now clearly Italian and French are practically identical and Spanish very close and I admit I know next to nothing about Portuguese and Romanian. I did hear Romanian kept Latin's noun declension system (which bring back bad memories of latin class). Point is yes to some degree Romance languages are mutually intelligible however NEVER assume if you learn just one you can speak all five of them (actually if you taken into account regional dialects you have hundreds of Romance Languages even Romansh spoken in Switzerland is a romance language).
atender exists in Portuguese as well, but it seems to be a false friend, as unlike in French and Italian it means to answer the phone, and to serve a client.
False friends exist between Portuguese and Spanish as well, though. Constipação and constipación are the same word, but in P. it usually means cold (the disease), whereas in Spanish it usually means the same as English constipation. Now, that meaning in P. is prisão de ventre
Italian and French are clearly similar in their written form, Spanish seems closer because both languages (IT and SP) are quite clear phonetically, unlike French which is rather unique in this way.
As a native speaker of Italian, I can understand Spanish if spoken slowly and Portuguese far less.
Romanian very very little.
atender exists in Portuguese as well, but it seems to be a false friend, as unlike in French and Italian it means to answer the phone, and to serve a client.
False friends exist between Portuguese and Spanish as well, though. Constipação and constipación are the same word, but in P. it usually means cold (the disease), whereas in Spanish it usually means the same as English constipation. Now, that meaning in P. is prisão de ventre
Sorry to quote myself, but I just noticed something funny: in English to wait means both to wait for something and to serve someone, like in waitress, seems to be the same as atender in those four Romance languages despite the different meanings. Odd, I wonder which meaning is older, and why the younger one developed Maybe because the servants in the Middle Ages had to wait so much when serving meals to noble people, i.e. waiting on tables
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