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The good news is that now that you’ve cracked French, you’ll find Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese easy. They’re all basically the same language with divergent
by madaxe_again 2y ago
The good news is that now that you’ve cracked French, you’ll find Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese easy. They’re all basically the same language with divergent dialects, but practically identical grammars and structure.
- namaria 2y agoSpanish, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, Italian, are all in a cluster together and a bit apart from French. I can read French, but I think it's equidistant from the Iberian/Italic language cluster and English. So the first language in that cluster after French won't exactly be "easy". Easier than without French yeah but the subsequent ones will be much easier and on the same level of difficulty from one to another as then you mostly just change the ending of the words and the most used connectives.
- madaxe_again 2y agoI’m a native English speaker, and French (and some very rusty Latin) was my bridge into that cluster - they’re absolutely heaving with common cognates and structures from my experience. What I will say is that my French has become much harder to access since - I will find myself lapsing into a creole for the first few days when I switch from one to the other.
- namaria 2y agoThat makes sense given that a huge chunk of modern English is derived from Norman French.