Spoken Italian against Spanish

K. T.   Wed Jul 22, 2009 11:57 pm GMT
" At an upper register, a lecture about organic chemistry or constitutional law is 100% intelligible in both ways"

This should be called the Richard Feynman effect as he was able to do this in Portuguese.

Interesting observations from you, PARISIEN.
rich   Thu Jul 23, 2009 12:59 am GMT
What did Richard F. do?

Well the common scientific vocabulary makes it very easy to understand things in that register. Even I can understand a scientific text in Spanish, after only having taken French and Latin.
K. T.   Thu Jul 23, 2009 1:57 am GMT
I've read that he impressed Portuguese speakers by saying "Consequently" in Portuguese. He used this "big word" (and cognate) because he forgot the word for "so", I think (or maybe he didn't know the word.)
Harman   Thu Jul 23, 2009 7:14 am GMT
Yes i agree with parisien.

Science TV shows are easier to understand than soap shows in all lenguages i have listened.

In english i notice discovery channel, national geography, cbc and bbc documentals are very easy to understand than good day LA, soap tv shows and so on, wich they use slang lenguage.

The same with portuguese, french, italian.

I think science lenguage is universal as so does mathematical lenguage.

I'm surprised with law spanish italian lenguage, but i have no law background education so i have no listen to law lenguage.
Areo   Sun Aug 02, 2009 7:42 am GMT
Italian is more related to French; Spanish to Portuguese.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity
Areo 2   Sun Aug 02, 2009 7:44 am GMT
Italian is the most similar to the other romance language, beacuse is the most conservative of voulgar latin terms.
JGreco   Sun Aug 02, 2009 9:30 pm GMT
But in terms of Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish, sometimes even the everyday language and slang terms can be understood between these two languages. I find that fascinating that occurs in Latin America. Sometimes I feel that is true due to TV culture (many times, telenovelas in both Brazil and Latin America are televised all over Latin America, usually just subtitled. Except for the most major networks such as Univision and Telemundo who feel the need to dub the Brazilian telenovelas in Mexican Spanish even though in almost all other local stations in country typically dub.).
us   Sun Aug 02, 2009 10:00 pm GMT
Italian is more similar to Spanish language.
El Somnoliento   Sun Aug 09, 2009 7:07 pm GMT
I'm a native spanish speaker. The first time I watched "Saló o le 120 giornate di Sodoma" which is in italian, I was surprised that I could understand a lot! Not everything is understandable though, but even without subtitles (i turned it off after a while) I could generally get what the storytellers are saying.
Kalimera   Sun Aug 09, 2009 10:46 pm GMT
But in terms of Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish, sometimes even the everyday language and slang terms can be understood between these two languages. //

Yup, bárbaro means ''great'' in Spanish and in Brazilian Portuguese, but it does not mean ''great'' in Continental Portuguese...

bacana is used in Brazil and in Chile too