• Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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    5 months ago

    While you can transfer a lot of knowledge from a Romance language into another, I wouldn’t call it “cheating”; people do this all the time when learning a new language, even unrelated or not-closely-related ones.

    In special, both her Portuguese and Italian show that she spent quite a bit of time/effort actually studying/training the languages, she isn’t just breezing through mutual Romance intelligibility.

    • Lemminary@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Yeah, I don’t mean to downplay her effort. She did say in her Portuguese interview that she learned it “in a month when she was 18” which was pretty much my experience learning a bit of French a few years back which I can mostly read after passively absorbing the grammar. It feels like reading Spanish for the most part.