[gnclmorais]

Interesting, I feel like I have the opposite issue. Coming from Portuguese, learning Spanish was a breeze and I can usually surprise French speaking people with “hard” words in my basic French sentences — just because I reached out to a Portuguese word and “frenchyfied” it.

[marcosdumay]

Going from native Portuguese, then French, and only then Spanish (yep, I've gone to a crazy school), I got much of the problem the GP was talking about. I don't think I've ever spoken so much French as the time when I was leaning Spanish.

There's something with those two languages in that they interfere badly.

[wwweston]

Spanish and Portuguese seem to be unusually close. Studying one helps me with the other.

Portuguese and Japanese on the other hand...

[pushpop]

The OP wasn’t talking about Japanese. They were talking about European languages- many of which share a common heritage

[saagarjha]

Not all of them do, but the ones mentioned were all very similar Romance languages.

[pushpop]

I’m aware not al of them do. This is why I said “many” and not “all”.

There are roughly 3 main groups of European languages: Italic (or Romance as you described it) for Western Europe, Germanic which is predominantly Central Europe, Scandinavian countries and the UK; and Balto-Slavic for Eastern Europe. Generally speaking of course.

However there is still a fair amount of cross pollination even with the Germanic and Italic languages, not to mention shared characteristics (not least of all a shared alphabet) that doesn’t exist with Japonic languages such as, well, Japanese.

[digaozao]

I think this dyslexia happens more with non native languages.

Like when I was trying to speak german, after just some time in France. My native language is Portuguese

[saagarjha]

German and Portuguese differ significantly more than French and Portuguese, so that might be affecting your experience…