How well can Spanish speakers understand Portuguese?

Both the Portuguese and Spanish languages are among the most common words spoken across the globe. The two languages are not only the most common languages, but both languages share many similarities, and this allows speakers to have a general understanding of each language even if they are not a native speaker!

Does Portuguese sound better than Spanish?

Spanish tends to sound more like Italian than European Portuguese. The biggest difference you can attribute this to is the vowel reduction in Portuguese or the weakening of vowel sounds. Unlike the melodic cadence of Italian and Spanish, European Portuguese is often compared to Slavic or Russian languages.

Why is the Portuguese language so different from the Spanish language?

The reason why Portuguese and Spanish sound so different is the Gaulish people, and its predecessors, the Celts, held strongest in the Northwest Iberian peninsula of what is modern day Galicia and Northern Portugal. During the Reconquesta, those same people of North West Iberia branched off into modern day Portugal.

What are the languages that sound closest to Portuguese?

Personally, I think the languages that sound closest to Portuguese, at least to my own Brazilian Portuguese, are Occitan and North Italian (Gallo-Romance) languages, including Catalan. But among those that I have heard I think the ones that sounded the most familiar to me were Ligurian and Piedmontese.

Why does European Portuguese sound like a Slavic language?

In fact, most Slavic languages are stress-timed and this is the main reason why European Portuguese sounds like a Slavic language. European Portuguese is, I believe, the only stress-timed romance language (there are other romance languages, like Catalan, which are slightly stress-timed but not as much as European Portuguese).

What are the similarities between Portuguese and Russian phonology?

Portuguese and Russian do have a superficially similar phonology, though the diversity of Portuguese means that some dialects do sound more like Russian than others — and some can sound a lot like Spanish. But what are these similarities? There is some overlap between the consonant inventories of the two languages.