Romanian is said to be one of the hardest languages to understand for speakers of other Romance languages. It shares that honor with French. However, Romanian speakers have fair intelligiblity of Italian. On the other hand, Italians can’t understand much of Romanian.
Here is an audio file in Romanian – a woman with a great, sexy voice reciting a beautiful poem. You will ruin the experiment if you look at the text while you listen. I know Spanish fairly well – that is, I can generally communicate orally with Spanish speakers. However, out of the 107 words in this poem, I think I understood 2 of them. That’s 2% intelligibility.
If you know Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese or another Romance language, listen to this Romanian audio file and see how much you can get. Even if you can’t understand it, it’s interesting to hear it spoken.
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I don’t know if I can speak Spanish fluently or not, but I can have a conversation in pure Spanish with a Spanish speaker for many hours. I had an Argentine gf once here in the US who really spoke almost no English. We conducted the whole affair in Spanish. There were some problems but not that many. I had a dictionary. I can read it pretty well, but not well enough to really have fun.
I can write Spanish ok, but not good enough to say, write a good blog post in it. I know some Spanish speakers on the Net and we talk in instant messenger in Spanish.
Wow, it’s almost mystical (like Icelandic, Irish Gælic and Basque kind-of mystic!) – I almost want to learn it now <3
I speak French as well as Spanish, but that still didn't give me much of an "edge" – I got 6% intelligibility, mostly because of the verbs; more because of French than Spanish.
My Ex was actually my motivation to learn Spanish (even if his English was passable) – so I know your feel there lol