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this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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Are you exaggerating when you say a few months? Because based on my personal experience as a native English speaker who's spent a combined ~14 years to study two languages (only one of which even stuck), I cannot imagine becoming more than "hooray I can occasionally pick out a word or two when watching the news!"-level of proficient in a new language after a few months, even with intense study.
Native speakers of a romance language are already at "occasionally pick out a word or two when watching the news" level or better for other romance languages, without having to study them at all. They simply share a lot of words amongst themselves. Becoming decently conversational in a few months is not an exaggeration.
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I think they were more referring to how knowing Spanish, a Latin-based language, can help in learning another Latin-based languages.
English is primarily Germanic-based so it falls out of the category for the most part.
I think the REAL "cheating" example is Spanish & Catalan.
I took 5 years in HS/college, and when I was in the Barcelona airport, I actually asked "why is everything written twice?" The differences seemed very very minor.
But I speak english poorly, and spanish... not really. So she's still 700% better than me!
Oh, not exaggerating at all. I can read quite a bit of Portuguese because it's quite similar to Spanish and also French because I learned some grammar. It's very much like reading German for English speakers. It can be tricky, but if you get the hang of mapping out some words between the two languages, it becomes much easier than it seems.