CHRS: CP437 2   
   MSGID: 1:18/200@fidonet 61f72fda   
   PID: MBSE-BBS 1.0.8 (GNU/Linux-x86_64)   
   TZUTC: -0400   
   TID: MBSE-FIDO 1.0.8 (GNU/Linux-x86_64)   
   -=> Carlos Navarro wrote to Sean Dennis <=-   
      
    SD> and if you can speak one, you can generally understand the other.   
      
    CN> No!   
    CN> They have some similarities, but they're quite different, both written   
    CN> and in pronunciation.   
    CN> Italian and Portuguese are closer to Spanish.   
      
   Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian are all Romance   
   languages, meaning they come from Vulgar ("common") Latin and share common   
   roots.  I do not speak French nor Italian though I do speak a bit of   
   Spanish--I took a semester of it while in high school in 1987--and with that   
   knowledge, I have found it easy to understand French and Italian better.  I   
   have no experience with Portuguese and Romanian but I suppose if I tried, I   
   could probably do the same thing.   
      
   While your points about those languages being different, they indeed do   
   share a lot in common and if you understand that, you can make out the jist   
   of what is being said in all three languages.  Like (most) computer   
   languages to me, the semantics are the same but the syntax is different.   
      
   I unfortunately lost my "tongue" for Spanish as I had no one to converse in   
   Spanish with though I think with a bit of effort, I could bring myself back   
   up to at least to a conversational level.  French, to me, is overly   
   complicated for the sake of being different.   Spanish has always been   
   easy to speak for me because it tends to follow its own rules better than   
   English.   
      
   Being a native English speaker, it can be difficult for me to learn other   
   languages, especially Japanese or Mandarin Chinese (both of which I have   
   attempted to learn but failed to do so).   
      
   However, my original point still stands for me as I can figure out phrases   
   and keywords in both French and Italian and make a semi-educated guess to   
   what's going on.  This is reading those languages; if they are being spoken   
   to me, I get lost very quickly.   
      
   -- Sean   
      
   ... Don't raise the bar.  It makes it too hard to get the drinks.   
   --- MultiMail/Linux   
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