how similar are spanish and portuguese???

Answer 1

Similar enough to cause someone a lot of funny slip-ups :-) ... You can understand great part of because of the context, when its a written text , but it's better check the words and not conclude the meaning is always the same.

Answer 2

The two languages are closely related but still not mutually intelligible.Just because two languages are closely related, does not mean they are mutually intelligible. A lot of people don't understand that.

Some linguists think that Portuguese has a Celt element in it that gives it its special flavor although this has been difficult to decisively prove. They point out that the nasalization and palatalization that exists in both Portuguese and French is more a characteristic of Celtic languages, especially Breton and Gaelic, than it is of Latin and Italian.

Because of its remoteness, Portuguese has retained a few archaic Vulgar Latin characteristics not found in Spanish, Catalan and standard Italian such as the preservation of the original Vulgar Latin /u/ sound in many masculine nouns. . This is also true of Romanian and Sicilian. For example "The wold" is O lobo (oo-loh-boo) in Portuguese, U lupu in Sicilian and lupul in Romanian, luplu in Vlach (a dialect of Romanian) but in Spanish, Catalan and Portugese the sound changed or disaapeared and we have El lobo (el-loh-boh), El llop and Il lupo respectively.

Most Romance linguists consider the Romance languages to interrelated to each other in a scheme roughly similar to the one below, even though there are always minor exceptions:

Romanian - French - Portuguese - Spanish- Catalan - Italian

Answer 3

Very similar...but some words are very similar and mean totally different things...If you study the origin of Spanish and portuguese you'll see how similar they are...it's very common for a spanish speaker understand at least portuguese writings...at least i do. So as català all these iberic languages have similar origins descending from the latin.

The català has more similarities than portuguese to spanish but català also share similarities with french due to català is a language spoken in a region between Spain and France.

Maybe català is one of the ancient languages spoken during the Middle Age but Spanish Imperialism from Castille imposed during long time Spanish as official language of all territories that conformed the old Spanish Empire (including Portugal, that after a short period of time got his independence)

If you read about Galician language spoken in the Spanish region of Galicia you'll see the origin of these 2 languages (sp and pt) Galician connects words as in portuguese as in spanish.

Answer 4

It's possible for a portuguese speaker to read well a spanish text. At the University I read some books in spanish even never having studied the language. It's somewhat easy also to understand what they speak, if they speak slowly. I visited Argentina and didn't have much difficulties to comunicate to the people there. But it's difficult for us to write and speak. But I believe that for a spanish speaker it's more difficult to understand what we say. They understand well also what they read in our language.

Answer 5

Not much really, but the origins of most words are the same so for us is easy to understand each others. But in grammar are quite different.