English | French | Portuguese | Italian

Right now I'm learning French & Portuguese. I know a little Spanish from my few months in Barcelona, Spain. Learning different languages makes me realize how similar English is to the Romance Languages. If you could get the pronunciation right, learning to speak another romance language is a breeze.
For example.

'Station'
in Portuguese its 'Estacao',
in Italian 'Stazione'
in Spanish Estacion.
but in French it's 'Gare'
* I know English and Spanish, so when I read the word 'Estacao' on the Portuguese website, I already knew what word it was.

'Arrival'
in Italian it's 'Arrivo' & in French it's 'Arrivee'
but
in Spanish it's 'Hora de llagada' & in Portuguese it's 'Chegada'

Again, if you know English and see the word 'arrival' in Italian or French, you have an ideal of what word it is. If you know Spanish, when you hear it in Portuguese, it almost sounds the exact same.

'Ticket'
in french it's 'Billet'
in Portuguese it's 'Bilhete'
in Italian it's 'Biglietto'
in Spanish it's 'Billete'

You'll find a lot of amazing similarites like this, when it comes to nouns and verbs. Althought they look the same, they all sound completely different. The hard part is understanding the pronunciation. When you see it, it's easy to recognize, but hearing it in the middle of a sentence is much harder.

'Supplement'
in French it's 'supplement'
in Portuguese it's 'suplemento'
in Italian it's 'supplemento'
in Spanish it's 'suplemento'

I guess I'm telling you these things incase you read a sign or book anywhere where the romance languages are used, notice that you could read it if you thought about it hard enough.

I must stress using pronunciation, because their are many words that are spelled the same, but if you can't say it like the natives, then it sounds like nothing.

For example
the word 'habit' in French is 'habit' but when pronuncing it it sounds like 'abi', because thay don't sound out the 'H' and the 't' is VERY silent.

Now you know why it's neccessary to know how to sound out all the letters of the alphabet of the language you are trying to learn.

Next Time, I will talk about the similarities of English, German, Dutch & Swedish.

It seems like english is just a mix of all the languages with it's own pronunciation.

This Travel Photoblog is part of my Free Travel Pictures website, Traveler's Trade.