Question for Europeans!

As I traveled around Europe, I was just curious about something I would like to ask.

I see Spanish, Italian and French seem similar to each other.

If you are either Spanish or Italian or French, would you say that it is easy to learn and improve those languages other than any other languages?

I already asked some of my European friends. Some of them said that it was easy to learn those languages than the other languages like German or Russian. However, the others said that it was still difficult to learn those languages same as the other languages.

I want to ask about your opinions!

If you're a Spanish or Italian or French speaker, please leave a comment below!

P.S. I also love any opinions from everyone! :)

JaeHong.S wrote:

I see Spanish, Italian and French seem similar to each other.

Also Portuguese (and some smaller romantic languages)

Yes, it's really easier, specially between Portuguese and Spanish (we even share something called "portuñol" in Latin America). Nevertheless, I've experienced some trouble with vocabulary when studying those three languages: many times you just can't remember if a word is Italian or Spanish (French is more distant in terms of pronunciation and spelling). There are shared similarities which cause both comprehension and confusion. For example, the expression "good morning": Bom dia (Portuguese), Buenos dias (Spanish), Buon giorno (Italian), Bom jour (French), but the word for "window", janela (Portuguese), ventana (Spanish), finestra (Italian) and fenètre (French).

Once, I've met two Romenian guys who could understand what I was talking with another Brazilian, but we could not make any idea of what they were chatting about.

JaeHong.S wrote:

Yes, I almost forgot Portuguese!
Interesting to hear about what you said!
I say it would be so amazing if a single person speaks Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and French!
Thanks for your opinion :)

Actually I can understand those languages much better than speaking, but only because I've been curious about foreign languages since very early in life. It's not like every speaker of those languages are effortlessly aware of them. 

Now I ask you: is it the same between Korean and other eastern languages?

JaeHong.S wrote:

I say it would be so amazing if a single person speaks Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and French!

Imo, this is not nearly as impressive as speaking unrelated languages.

Valeria.Fontes wrote:

Now I ask you: is it the same between Korean and other eastern languages?

Japanese comes somewhat close to Korean, but I wouldn't say it's as similar as the romantic languages. No other language comes close imo.

As a native Serbian speaker, I can say that it was definitely much easier learning Russian (another Slavic language) than Danish (a Germanic language). My Russian is still decent, even though I haven't been actively studying it for nearly four years, because it just works similarly to Serbian and it's easy to switch my brain into "Russian mode" from "Serbian mode" quickly. Much easier than going to "Danish mode", at least.

The case system in Russian is nearly exactly the same as in Serbian, the alphabet is the same, a lot of the vocabulary is either exactly the same words or words with the same Slavic roots. The way Russian people phrase things is also similar to our way of speaking, and it's quite easy. to understand a new word from context if a sentence is built in the same way as in my native language.

A lot of Slavic languages are pretty similar, and we can understand other South Slavic languages decently (some are even completely mutually intelligible), and sometimes get by with Western or Eastern Slavic speakers using words from our language as well.

Kosta.Cirkovic wrote:

As a native Serbian speaker, I can say that it was definitely much easier learning Russian (another Slavic language) than Danish (a Germanic language). My Russian is still decent, even though I haven't been actively studying it for nearly four years, because it just works similarly to Serbian and it's easy to switch my brain into "Russian mode" from "Serbian mode" quickly. Much easier than going to "Danish mode", at least.
The case system in Russian is nearly exactly the same as in Serbian, the alphabet is the same, a lot of the vocabulary is either exactly the same words or words with the same Slavic roots. The way Russian people phrase things is also similar to our way of speaking, and it's quite easy. to understand a new word from context if a sentence is built in the same way as in my native language.
A lot of Slavic languages are pretty similar, and we can understand other South Slavic languages decently (some are even completely mutually intelligible), and sometimes get by with Western or Eastern Slavic speakers using words from our language as well.

Language families are amazing! Although I enjoy both processes: the weirdness of similarities and the complete darkness of a distant language.

Language families are amazing! Although I enjoy both processes: the weirdness of similarities and the complete darkness of a distant language.

I completely agree! I took a semester of linguistic typology and it was just fascinating to see the genealogy of different languages, grammatical similarities, shared vocabulary or etymology, and the geographical areas that some language families cover. For example, I'd never think that Turkish and Japanese were in any way related, and yet they are!

IAnd by the way, I forgot to mention that as a Danish learner, I can mostly understand written Norwegian and Swedish just fine, and even spoken is sometimes alright for me. Norwegian, after all, is basically the same as Danish but with pronunciation that makes sense :D

It is very interesting to read those comments :) 

I definitely understand now how people feel more comfortable with other languages similar to native languages.