Item — HN Reader

As native Spanish speaker, I confirm the closeness to Italian and Portuguese. Particularly in scientific literature, I can read words in Italian/Portuguese and the sound I hear in my head is in Spanish. Other than that I speak French and English, although it doesn't feel that much of an accomplishment given that all the aforementioned stem from Latin.

As an aside, I don't consider German to be a language I speak or even understand perfectly when I hear it, but being equipped with all those languages reading papers in German is a walk in the park.

2 comments

> but being equipped with all those languages reading papers in German is a walk in the park.

I find when reading a news article in Italian I can get the bones of the article (bank robbery, police chase, no injuries, size of sum stolen) but not the meat (so we’re the robbers caught or did they get away?)

Yes, that's why I can only do so with technical articles rather than conversational/general literature (papers rather than newspapers), the vocabulary is more standardized :)

yeah...

I do speak both portuguse (native) and fluent spanish to the point that native speakers sometimes thinking i am also native spanish speaker, but it almost fell like cheating the pool because both languages are so close.

One fun point, i never really took proper Spanish classes, i started working with Spanish customer in 2008 and just took a 3 or 4 classes just to get the basics for the job interview i had to do. I got fluent actually speaking with our customer all over latin america.

Beside those i also speak english that i learned mostly by playing video games.