Sure it's easy to find examples of such as this and even I can read French and get the gist of most of it (that 40% of English comes from French also helps of course). But understanding spoken language is a lot more difficult.

I said you'd most likely have an understanding of it, not understand it completely.

Go to a little electronics kiosk to buy batteries and I'm like "se vende pilas aqui?" (Do you sell batteries here), and the lady looks like she has no clue what I'm saying so I'm like "pilas...dobro a?" (Double a batteries) and she still seems really confused and is like "no"...so I start walking away and get a few feet and she says "É pilhas!", finally registering what I was looking for which she did have and also proving my point that sometimes even when the words are nearly identical (pila vs pilha) people still might not be able to understand you.

I'll add that normally I'll look up words that I know I'm going to need in advance in situations like this so that I don't just start speaking Spanish to people, but in this case I had used 'pila' before in Brazil and not been corrected so I just assumed that was it.

Met a girl today and then was out with her and some other people people and she was telling someone else about me and she was like "he's a gringo and he speaks a mixture of Spanish and Portuguese", but I had barely talked to her so I really wonder what it is that I said in Spanish.

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It would be a fun exercise to try to translate from Latin not knowing Latin but various romance languages.

I've actually written a function before where I needed a NULL string placeholder, that wasn't an empty string. I used Lorem Ipsum from a google search.

And before everyone excoriates me - I needed a string that did not collide with a string in the data. Lorem ipsum is pretty unlikely to collide with a string in the data.

All you need is italian and with italian it's pretty easy. If you're not allowed to speak italian then you need spanish and french and you can sorta piece the rest together.

Is gringo meant as a slur? Really feels like a slur when I get called one.

Actually I meant to post about that too but then forgot-- in Colombia it is considered a slur and a Colombian would never call a gringo a gringo to their face. In Brazil though it's not a slur at all but has definitely taken me a bit to get used to. They'll also use "moça"-- which just means "girl" to get a waitresses's attention or "rapaz" (boy) for a waitor so the sorts of sensibilities that we have about calling people "girl/boy/gringo" don't seem to exist in Brazil.

There's not alot of incentive to learn new languages if your language is dominate especially where you live. If I learned another language other then the two I know French and English I would never use them. I live in a top 5-10 country and most of the other 5-10 country's speak english why do I care to learn more? I dont need it for work. If someone moves to my country and doesn't know or want to learn english and only wants to hang out with their own people and be isolated that's kinda on them. Same If I emigrated

I wonder if Chat GPT or whatever dominant AI feature we have in the near future will make learning a 2nd language obsolete. We'll probably be able to speak any language to each other with some sort of instant translator program.

ya that's a good point we are probably a few years away. The tech is there someone just needs to profitize it

English and Parakeet at minimum.

I'm back in your shithole country for a few months.

Was complimented several times today on my Portuguese which was nice. I'm pretty sure I can say that my Portuguese is better than my Spanish has ever been, despite spending only two months in Brazil and like 18 months combined in Spanish speaking countries-- but my Portuguese speaking experiences have just been so much more immersive than my Spanish speaking ones. Even now while back in US, I'm off to go spend a month with my friend's mom who only speaks Portuguese-- whereas I've never lived with a Spanish speaker.

Originally had my flight to Recife, then to Manaus, then to Fort Lauderdale but as I'm literally about to board in Recife last night they scan my code and tell me I'm now flying direct from Recife and that they were putting me, another American, and 4 Brazilians up in a hotel. So I'm speaking English with the American and Portuguese with the Brazilians, and one of the Brazilians at breakfast this morning asked me if I was born in Mexico. The other day the door man at my friend's apartment wondered if I was Portuguese (it's practically a different language compared to Brazilian).

The other day buying souvenirs a lady told me "muchas gracias", and it's always real sweet when people try to be accommodating by speaking a language that's neither yours nor theirs native language.

Misplaced my sim card ejector so I go into one of the bookstore type places at the Fort Lauderdale airport and I'm like "this is a super long shot but you wouldn't per chance have a sim ejector here" and she's like "nah...", Then I asked if maybe she had a needle and I could tell that she had no clue what a needle was so I used the Spanish word "Spina"; and that prompted her to take her earrings off to use it to eject my sim- although it turns out that my ejector was just tucked behind my phone case. But had I not recognized that she didn't know what I meant and known the Spanish word that would have never happened. No instant language translator can replicate those sorts of experiences.