I agree with you. My wife is Japanese and she can read Chinese to some degree because the Japanese idiograms are derived from the Chinese, but she can’t have a conversation with them. Similarly, I used to be ok in Spanish and could hold very basic conversation with an ex’s grandmother from Portugal, but only because they deal with European Spanish speakers often due to proximity. Brazillian Portuguese is a very different language than European Portuguese as are the American dialects of Spanish different from European Spanish or Canadian French from continental French.
It would be interesting a server in Brazil, however, in my humble opinion, we would not have enough player for a server, and I would be happy to play with Latinos if it were the case to share the server.
I speak spanish and understand portuguese perfectly fine without ever properly learning the language. A Brazilian only server, just like a spanish speaking only server, would be pretty low population on its own.
I dated a Mexican girl for a long time. I remember meeting her for the first time and calling her Spanish. Her head almost exploded and she corrected me by saying she was “Hispanic not Spanish”.
This kinda falls into this thread category I think.
As i’ve said on the BR foruns, they only made this because of the NA crybabies that can’t literally just play with some cultural diferences, i’ll not change to a server only to satisfy some xenofobhic ppl and still play with 200 ping. Blizzard literally are just trowing everyone that the NA don’t like on a SINGLE server, they even tried to make a couple of it, a pvp and a pve…
Lol at people saying spanish and portuguese are almost identical. My first language is spanish. I once dated a brazilian girl and we had to speak in english to understand each other. Some people can speak portuñol (a mix of both languages), not everyone.
In both Brazil and Portugal, there are people talking to each other while some speak in Spanish and others in Portugeese.
It’s not perfect communication, but the people get the jist of what they are saying.
and before you come at me, I am both a professor of Linguistics and from Spain.
They are different languages, yes, but people who speak either language can basically understand what’s being said.
This is especially true if writing and avoiding slang. The problems with communication are largely due to accent and slang.
English: I want water
Spanish: quiero agua
Portuguese: quero água
Which of two of these three look the most similar? That’s why when a spanish speaker who doesn’t speak protuguse hears quero água - they still understand it, and vice-versa.
Portuguse and Spanish are close linguistics neighbours, having originated from Iberia, and broke off much more recently than French or Italian. For this reason, speakers of either language are able to understand each other to some extent. Some one who speaks zero english will understand much easier and be able to communicate with someone who speaks Spanish rather than an English speaker.
Lexical similarity is a measure only of the similarities between the vocabularies of two languages. It does nothing to compare their syntax and phonetics (let alone idioms, slang, and cultural context), which also play a large role in the mutual intelligibility of two languages.
For instance, English shares a fairly high similarity with German (60%) but I, nor the majority of Americans, can understand 60% of what a German is saying when they’re speaking fluidly.
If there isn’t some sort of misunderstanding between you and your coworkers, then it sounds more likely that they may have found a way to speak around the differences, or perhaps they had more exposure to the other language than they realized?
Well, you’re either lying or your colleagues were BS’ing you. Romance languages have such minor similarities (on the practice) that you might as well be talking to someone from a different planet. I’m half french half spaniard and i can’t understand a single word of italian or portuguese.
Can Americans understand german without studying it? both english and german derive from proto-germanic so it should be a walk in the park, right?