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The funny thing is that partially we can. It's the funniest shit to watch a group of Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian people. Kind of like watching an English speaker somewhat understanding Dutch.
reading "u kunt" on dutch signs always cracks me up
And how the Dutch often say “Sorry hoor“
The Dutch pronounce “hoor” almost like whorethe dutch for 'renting' is the same as german for 'whores' so when skishops translate it for tourists it always gets a laugh.
My favourite Dutch word is Slagboom
why do you like it so much?
I just picture it in my mother's talk about how ladies should keep their legs closed ... like "Now, Seven, you're getting to that age when older men start taking an interest in you, and you don't want to come down with a case of Slagboom, what would the neighbours think?!"
Kind of like watching an English speaker somewhat understanding Dutch.
Yeah but you can't really understand them it just sort of sounds like you should be able to and you're not hearing them properly. You have no idea what they're actually saying.
The ebb and flow of the languages are almost identical, but the words are completely different.
My thoughts exactly, if I'm hearing someone speak French then my brain says "that's a different language", but Dutch sounds similar enough to English that my brain says "that's gobbledygook, there's trickery afoot!"
First time I heard Dutch I thought I was having a stroke.
Probably more like a German and Dutch speaker. I speak fluent English and fluent German (to like an 8 year-olds standard), I can sort of understand Dutch.
Same with the Scandinavian languages. You can mostly figure out what they're talking about, but some words are just gibberish. I had two Danish girls try to hit on me at a bar here in Sweden many years ago, the only thing I understood was that they found me attractive because I look like Bob Dylan and they are fans of him. Danish is especially hard, IMO, even more so when it's spoken by drunk people.
My friend got by on 7 years in Germany only knowing
"Ein bier, bitte."
and
"Willst du fich mich?"
Most likely they were using them in the opposite order there, and the beer glass helped ice the swelling.
Slut.
At my wedding the Filipinas all called out "guapo!" and 3 of us looked up. :)
As a Romanian I can understand a lot of Italian and Spanish, but I really can't understand how Portuguese is related to these languages. I can't understand a single word. (French is different too, but I've heard it enough to pick up on it). On the other hand, my wife just naturally understands all romance languages, including Portuguese, so maybe it's just me.
How odd. I can speak a bit of Spanish. I used to be able to hold casual conversations (after a few drinks) but was nowhere near fluent. I was able to understand just a bit of Portuguese such that I was able to watch some Brazilian shows on Netflix and get the gist of about every third sentence.
I’ve been told that Portuguese speakers can understand Spanish pretty well, but that the reverse isn’t always true, and that both can muddle by in Italian with short phrases. French, on the other hand, is a whole different animal for me.
Portuguese from Portugal and from Brazil are extremely similar languages but not from a phonetic POV. Portuguese people sound like Russian people where as Brazilian people sound more like Italian people if that makes any sense.
That being said I very much disagree with the initial comment. Portuguese people will understand Spanish people somewhat well (depending on their age and education) but Italian and French is a bit of a stretch and it definitely isn’t the other way around. My theory for the main reason is that in Portugal almost no TV Shows are dubbed except the ones for kids and even then not always (I’m Portuguese and I watched many cartoons in Spanish on TV). This isn’t the case in the other European countries so they don’t really get used to hearing other languages often.
Kind of watching an English speaker somewhat understanding Dutch.
Which is kinda freaky when you've never heard Dutch before but you stumble onto videos of Dutch people taking drugs.
Am I supposed to take drugs to for this to work
You can, especially MDMA since that was the first video I found and you can almost understand him when he's high.
When I went to Brazil, I met a girl and we would communicate like that. I would speak Spanish, and she would respond in Portuguese. We understood each other fairly well. I then became enamored with Portuguese. It's such a beautiful language to me.
The English person does have to be drunk though.