Yeah, I mostly mean that I expected fellow romance languages to be more similar.
BTW mantidor that's terrifying, I plan to learn Portuguese at some point -because- it's so close to Spanish, but never considered that would be a double edged sword :0
But, harder than Japanese? I'll remain skeptical
I've been "learning" since I was a kid and I still feel like a toddler in Japan. Bleeeh. And it's very likely that I'll always suck at kanji. I remember reading it's one of the "super hard" languages along with Korean, Chinese and... Arabic, I think.
Reading is another thing, isn't it? even japanese people themselves aren't 100% ready to read a newspaper until at least finishing high school, but grammar and pronunciation are incredibly easy.
Portuguese presents two huge challenges, first you are probably familiar with the concept of false friends, how words that seem the same are completely different, like "molestar" in spanish as opposed to "molest" in english, well Portuguese and Spanish are
absolutely plagued with them, you can't trust any word, no matter how similar it seems, how much sense it makes, in truth like 80% of both languages are exactly the same, but brazilians use far more that other 20%.
The other challenge is of course pronunciation, unfortunately Spanish is very poor in sounds, this is also a problem for us in any other language, except japanese, the only thing hard in japanese is the "fu" letter.
At the end the difficulty to separate both is too great, right now I'm typing in english and thinking in english, it's easy enough to "tune in" in the other language, my japanese is probably also the one of a toddler, but I at least can do the same, I think in japanese, even if it's awful, with portuguese though is really difficult to achieve that, it's like tuning in on radio stations that overlap.
