Do Spanish speakers* understand Portuguese or Catalan better?

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nooj
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Do Spanish speakers* understand Portuguese or Catalan better?

Postby nooj » Wed May 12, 2021 8:37 pm

*Spanish speakers who don't actively speak Portuguese or Catalan, or have had a minimum passive exposure to these two languages before.

Obviously behind such a question, there's numerous factors, such as:

1) Exposure. Do you live in a frontier zone with a Portuguese or Catalan speaking region, or do you live inside one of these areas?

2) The speed at which the language is spoken.

3) The topic.

4) The register.

5) The dialect of Portuguese or Catalan in question.

6) Are you listening in on a conversation between many people or is only one person talking?

7) If it's an audiovisual content, do you have subtitles to help you?

8) Is there visual aid (graphics, looking at the person's mouth etc)?

9) Is the Portuguese or Catalan being spoken by a second language speaker? Are you listening to Portuguese being spoken by a Bolivian who has spent some time living in Brazil or Catalan being spoken by a Norwegian who has spent some time living in Catalonia?

9) Is the Spanish speaker themselves a native speaker or a second language speaker?

10) And many more factors that haven't occurred to me.

Taking into account all of these, can we come to a 'general' answer about this question?
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Re: Do Spanish speakers* understand Portuguese or Catalan better?

Postby jmar257 » Sat May 15, 2021 6:08 pm

I waited to respond to this since I'm not a native, but since no one else has given it a go I'll be the first post. Short bit about my level: I've never had a real test but got ~B2 on that new iTalki test and generally have no problem following TV/podcasts given it's in a more "standard" dialect (standard Castilian, Mexican, etc.). I also have some knowledge of French, although not as much as Spanish, and I've done no study of Catalan or Portuguese. Also assuming you mean understanding the spoken language, not written. Reading I can get a grasp of both, however Catalan is still more transparent.

Catalan:
I can pick words out here and there and get the gist of things given it's spoken slowly. I watched a video about multilingualism in Belgium (video in Spanish) a while back that included a Catalan woman that worked for the EU going back home and speaking in Catalan (with Spanish subs), there were a couple of instances where I didn't notice the language change for a couple of seconds, although overall I did need the subs. I may be overstating it a bit, but watching the video I was kind of shocked how well I understood the Catalan without having to read the Spanish subs for parts of it.

Portuguese:
I can pick up words here and there but not get the gist at all. Maybe if someone spoke slowly I could figure it out, but this is definitely harder to parse than Catalan. I've had more exposure to it, however, and specifically Brazilian Portuguese. I've watched several videos of a UFC fighter's camp in Portuguese (subtitled in English) and really needed the subs, and train Brazilian jiu-jitsu under a Brazilian. He'll speak Portuguese to some students and I may catch a word for a body part or something here or there, but in general do not understand. Which is a bit of a disadvantage when he's coaching the person you're rolling with and they're already better than you :lol:
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Re: Do Spanish speakers* understand Portuguese or Catalan better?

Postby El Forastero » Sun May 16, 2021 2:20 am

I haven't been exposed to Catalan before, neither by reading nor by listening.

Concerning portugues, I can say that the very first time I was exposed to a brazilian portugues content was this song: Dança da Solidão. It immediately caught my attention, I undesrtood around 60% of the lyrics.



I live in a rather monolingual spanish city with no contact with portuguese speakers, so I have no other option than repeat that CD several times a day, having the lyrics to read and repeat. It was easy to inderstand.

The first time I was in contact with portuguese from Portugal, I was already B2 in portugues and I barely understood a word here and there. It sounds to me as a totally different language
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Re: Do Spanish speakers* understand Portuguese or Catalan better?

Postby mentecuerpo » Sun May 16, 2021 5:07 am

When I went to Portugal, I understood a lot of the Portuguese, and they understood a lot of my Salvadorian Spanish. We could communicate speaking slowly, without many problems.

When I went to Barcelona, I did not understand a word of Catalan. Granted, I used Spanish, and the Catalan speakers spoke to me in Spanish, but when they spoke among each other, I did not understand much.
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Re: Do Spanish speakers* understand Portuguese or Catalan better?

Postby nooj » Sun May 16, 2021 8:56 am

Interesting, I wonder if there is a difference between American Spanish speakers vs European Spanish speakers in relation to how they understand both languages.

Here's a non-scientific experiment I want to try. I've tried to get a wide variety of informal/formal subject matters and some dialects. It should take around 15 min if you listen to a couple of minutes of each video. Which language do you understand better? I haven't included Brazilian Portuguese because I wanted to keep the sample range within the Iberian Peninsula.

Portuguese from Portugal

Mathgurl - a young woman from Guimarães, a city in the north west of Portugal. She speaks about mathematics.

Missão 100% Português - The two presenters are from Lisboa.

La Mesma Lhéngua, por Ana Laíns - 1a parte - divulgative, formal interviews about the Mirandese language

Queijadas de grão de bico - a recipe channel, the author is from the Açores. Some Portuguese from outside of the islands say that the Açores dialects are very hard for them to understand.

Conta-me Como Foi - an episode from a well known Portuguese TV series.

Catalan from Spain


L'Alqueria Blanca - 013 - Per amor a la terra - an episode from a Valencian TV show

Entrevista a El Diluvi - an interview with a Valencian band, they're from l'Alcoià, a region in the south of Valencia.

La via verda - a TV show that visited the Terres de l'Ebre, starting with the city of Tortosa. North-Western Catalan dialect.

Entrevista a Rita Payés- Rita Payés is a trumpet player from Vilassar de Mar, which is a town in the province of Barcelona.

Formatjades de ses madones des Pinar - a recipe to make formatjada, a traditional pastry from the island of Menorca. The women come from the capital city, Ciutadella.

Passió per la moda i els cavalls - a young teenager from Eivissa, from the town of Sant Antoni de Portmany. She speaks a Western dialect of Eivissan Catalan.
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Re: Do Spanish speakers* understand Portuguese or Catalan better?

Postby Cainntear » Sun May 16, 2021 9:54 am

nooj wrote:Obviously behind such a question, there's numerous factors, such as:
...
10) And many more factors that haven't occurred to me.

Another factor I think is important is knowledge of other Romance languages. If you look at the Western Romance languages as a sort of continuum east to west (something of a simplification, as there are north-south differences too) then obviously Portuguese is the extreme -- Portugal is the westernmost point of the continuum (we can't consider colonies as part of the continuum, as they were settled after the continuum was formed), and Catalan is somewhere in the middle. A Spanish speaker who also speaks French and Italian is going to be able to recognise most of the vocab and structures in Catalan that don't exist in Spanish, because a lot of them are also present in either French or Italian.

Also, the speaker's dialect of Spanish, and this goes back to the continuum idea. While there is a clear distinction between Portuguese and Spanish today, the boundaries would have been much fuzzier a thousand years ago, and local dialectal variation in Spanish still reflects the lost continuum of local languages; phonetically, the closer you are in Spain to Portugal, the closer the sounds of Spanish will be to Portuguese in certain ways. This is perhaps more true in the north of Spain than the south, where there are still local languages distinct from Spanish, even if they're not widely taught or recognised.
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Re: Do Spanish speakers* understand Portuguese or Catalan better?

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sun May 16, 2021 8:47 pm

nooj wrote:
Entrevista a Rita Payés- Rita Payés is a trumpet player from Vilassar de Mar, which is a town in the province of Barcelona.


Just to nitpick, Rita Payés plays trombone, and sings as well. :)
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Re: Do Spanish speakers* understand Portuguese or Catalan better?

Postby nooj » Sun May 16, 2021 9:35 pm

Oh the shame! Thank you for the correction.

Interestingly, some Americans (an Argentinian and a Mexican, respectively) state that they have problem with understanding the interview and ask for Spanish subtitles, a request unlikely to be listened to by the programme:

Podrían poner subtítulos en español, tiene un gran público en Argentina y quisiéramos poder entender todo, aunque muchos captamos bastante del catalán, se nos haría la vida mas sencilla, gracias.

Soy Mexicano del Pacífico norte y concuerdo con mi compadre Argentino. Aunque me encantaría expandir mi repertorio lingüístico, hoy por hoy, nomás da para mi sencillo Castellano muy a su manera Mexicana. Pienso que logro comprender palabras aquí y allá, pero francamente me gustaría escuchar de Rita así bien clara y precisa de su ronco pecho todo lo que tenga que decir. Abrazo!


I wonder if American Spanish speakers have more difficulty understanding Catalan than European Spanish speakers?
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Re: Do Spanish speakers* understand Portuguese or Catalan better?

Postby leosmith » Wed May 19, 2021 4:00 am

Non-native (but somewhat advanced) Spanish speaker here. I only watched 2 of each, and ranking by ease:
1) Passió per la moda i els cavalls (like Spanish with a strong, unknown accent)
2) Mathgurl (I could follow quite a bit of it, but this was definitely helped by all the visual aids)
3) Missão (I didn't understand much, but again the visual aids seemed to help a bit)
4) L'Alqueria Blanca (Only caught a few obvious Spanish overlap phrases. Very low energy seemed to make it harder)
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Re: Do Spanish speakers* understand Portuguese or Catalan better?

Postby Dagane » Wed May 19, 2021 8:06 pm

Spanish is my only native language. Nowadays I'd say that Portuguese is easier to understand... just because my exposure to this language has been way greater. Furthermore, my exposure to Galician has been even greater and the two languages are closely related.

Thinking back to my monolingual past, I don't know. Perhaps Catalan felt easier than Portuguese from Portugal because of the accent. I am not sure about Portuguese from Brazil.

There is a joke in Spain about Portuguese being easier to understand than Catalan.
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