I like the expression, but the example of Portuguese/Spanish is absurd IMO. As a Portuguese speaker, the amount of effort required to communicate with Spanish speakers is very, very high, to the point where I avoid trying at all costs. Here in Texas, it is almost always more effective for my family to communicate with Spanish speakers using very broken English and hand gestures on both sides than trying to get any Portuguese-Spanish mutual intelligibility to work.
But the comparison was to Scots, which is (sometimes, not universally) considered a dialect of English rather than a separate language, but is hard for standard English speakers to understand. It's not just English with a Scottish accent. I have no idea how Portuguese feels to Spanish speakers or vice versa, but here's an example of modern Scots from Wikipedia. I'm curious how it compares.
> Noo the nativitie o' Jesus Christ was this gate: whan his mither Mary was mairry't till Joseph, 'or they cam thegither, she was fund wi' bairn o' the Holie Spirit.
Than her guidman, Joseph, bein an upricht man, and no desirin her name sud be i' the mooth o' the public, was ettlin to pit her awa' hidlins.
>But as he had thir things in his mind, see! an Angel o' the Lord appear't to him by a dream, sayin, "Joseph, son o' Dauvid, binna feared to tak till ye yere wife, Mary; for that whilk is begotten in her is by the Holie Spirit.
> "And she sall bring forth a son, and ye sal ca' his name Jesus; for he sal save his folk frae their sins."
> Noo, a' this was dune, that it micht come to pass what was said by the Lord throwe the prophet,
>"Tak tent! a maiden sal be wi' bairn, and sal bring forth a son; and they wull ca' his name Emmanuel," whilk is translatit, "God wi' us."
Sae Joseph, comin oot o' his sleep, did as the Angel had bidden him, and took till him his wife.
> And leev'd in continence wi' her till she had brocht forth her firstborn son; and ca'd his name Jesus.
As a native speaker of English and having conversational ability in Spanish I would describe both Scots and Portuguese as separate languages. Portuguese feels like it has as much in common with Spanish as Italian or French to me, and I can't remotely carry on a conversation in Portuguese. (Or Scots really, though with the somewhat mutual intelligibility I can speak English or Spanish and maybe that's workable, but I'm definitely not going to understand the Portuguese.)
I'm a fluent second-language Spanish speaker and have had a lot of success communicating with native Portuguese speakers, but only Portugal Portuguese and various African Portugueses. I can't understand Brazilian Portuguese at all.
I am Italian and whenever I go to Spain I usually don't really need to speak English because the languages are close enough that you can go by by just knowing a handful of basic words (and the Spaniards I meet usually prefer it that way). This is both a blessing and a curse; all Italians I met living in Spain (and viceversa, all Spanish-speakers I met in Italy) tend to have a hard time learning the other language "properly" because the threshold for being understood is extremely low. If, perchance, someone speaks an Italian with Spanish grammar, people will still understand you perfectly.
Given that Castillan and Portuguese are even closer (both Western Romance, part of a linguistic continuum, ...) I find it very hard to believe that honestly. I am only familiar with the European variants, thought. Maybe the issues you faced are due to how the Latin American variants have diverged significantly over the years?
The big difference between ES and PT is the accent/pronunciation of letters and matching words. Secondarily, is the differing vocabulary. But a lot of these are still understood as archaic/uncommon alternative words.
(see shoen's post below.)
So, if you learn the accent of the other language, all of a sudden a large portion of the language is unlocked. This happened to me, almost like a light switch.
I don't have a lot of experience with Italian but it seems like the pronunciation is closer to Spanish.
I speak fluent second-language Spanish and have had next to no difficulty communicating with native Portuguese speakers from Mozambique, Cabo Verde, and Portugal. What variety of Portuguese do you speak?
I'll concede that it's possible that I actually have an advantage as a second-language speaker, since my Spanish is probably slower than a native's and when I'm listening I'm already doing more work than a native is accustomed to.
Brazilian Portuguese has some phonological differences that I think confuse people in both directions more than other varieties of Portuguese, like the /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ for <t> and <d> in various contexts. For example a Spanish speaker would probably have a hard time recognizing that Brazilian Portuguese /dʒi'abu/ is cognate with Spanish <diablo>. A Brazilian Portuguese speaker who was less familiar with Spanish might similarly have a hard time recognizing /ˈdjablo/ as cognate with Portuguese <diabo> 'devil'.
Or Brazilian /'sedʒi/ is cognate with Spanish <sed> 'thirst'. A Spanish speaker will have to know to effectively ignore the /ʒi/ in order to recognize the word easily!
Maybe more extreme, Brazilian /'hedʒi/ (written <rede>) is cognate with Spanish <red> 'net, network'.
You might also be familiar with a greater variety of Spanish pronunciations as a non-native speaker... if you know Argentine /'ʃubja/ and /'ʃabe/, then you have a better chance to recognize Brazilian /'ʃuvɐ/ and /'ʃavi/ ('rain' and 'key', respectively).
Yeah, I suspect that OP speaks Brazilian Portuguese but I didn't want to assume.
I should have specified in my original post, but I only meant that Portugal Portuguese (and at least a few of the African varieties that are still very close to Portugal's) are mutually intelligible with Spanish. Which actually just further illustrates the complexity of categorizing speech into discrete languages...
a friend of mine who grew up in argentina went for an interview at a university in brasil.
they reported that on the first day, portugese was just gibberish. on the second day they realized they could read a solid chunk of a portugese newspaper. on the third day they felt they were beginning to understand what people were saying to them.
This really what "mutually intelligible" means, I'd say: that the languages are so close you can sort of work it out without explicit instruction. You still need some experience with the other language - and quite often there'll be a geographical and cultural proximity that means almost all speakers have that.
I grew up in a Scandinavian country and visited the others a lot when I was young, and I find I understand most of what I hear in the other languages, but it's quite common for my peers who don't have that experience to understand nothing.
Probably not as absurd as you think. I reckon if you dropped an American in a random town in Scotland (or even a northern English town, for that matter), they would also need to use very broken English and hand gestures to communicate as well. Glaswegian or Geordie is near incomprehensible to RP speaking Brits, yet alone to an American who's only exposure to Scottish is Mel Gibson as William Wallace.
I may be way off here, and happy to be corrected.
My experience is Texas-Spanish is difficult to use in Spain, and would guess the inverse is true. Which I would deduce making Portuguese-Spanish a non-starter in the state.
I know a very limited amount from having grown up and played soccer in the "Mexican" rec leagues in Tx. While traveling to Spain, English is perfectly fine in cities. But days trips to smaller towns/villages they had more trouble understanding my attempts to communicate with the basic texas-spanish I had picked up, than they did the hand gestures and single english word here and there. I understood next to nothing in Portugal (it might as well had been Dutch to my ears; I had no idea until now that they are kinda similar in the way Spanish/Italian is). Of course, this could be that I'm simply horrible at Spanish. But have heard Texas-Spanish is even weird for Baja-California-Spanish speakers.
Spain Spanish and <pick-latam-country> Spanish are the same language with very different vocabulary.
(Well, not quite, because Spain Spanish has loismo and what not that <pick-latam-country> Spanish almost certainly does not, and there's other variations as well, like Argentine Spanish having very different imperatives, Argentine and Colombian voceo vs. tuteo everywhere else, etc.)
Given the context, you'd probably have an easier time talking Portuguese with someone from Vigo than, say, Juarez, but even then, that might depend on you not having a Brazilian dialect...
After all, Spanish & Brazilian speakers in the new world have their own dialects (not languages).
I don't thinm the intention was to paint Spanish and Portuguese are incredibly similar, only to say that they're more similar than Scots and English which are still considered the same language.
