Spanish vs Portuguese

How similar are Spanish and Portuguese?

Very close on the page, noticeably further apart out loud — and the false friends are the real hazard.

Both descend from Latin and sit in the Romance branch, so written Spanish and Portuguese share a great deal of vocabulary and near-identical sentence structure. A Spanish reader can usually get the gist of Portuguese text without study.

Speech is less forgiving, and the asymmetry is well known: Portuguese speakers generally understand spoken Spanish more easily than the reverse. Portuguese has nasal vowels and a set of reduced unstressed vowels that Spanish lacks, so the same written word can sound unfamiliar.

The trap is false friends. Portuguese esquisito means strange, not exquisite. Embaraçada means embarrassed, not pregnant — but Spanish embarazada does mean pregnant. Because the languages are close, these errors slip past unnoticed in a way they never would between unrelated languages.