I would the regard the mutual intelligibility (MI) of English with not only Spanish but Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian to be 0%. Sure there are similar Latinate cognates in English via Latin borrowings in the Middle Ages, but that won’t be enough to make a conversation intelligible. I meet English speakers all the time who tell me they can’t speak or understand a word of Spanish. They never say, “Well, you know, English and Spanish are so similar that, even though I don’t speak Spanish, I can still get a lot of the conversation.”
I also meet monolingual Spanish speakers around my town all the time. I start speaking English to them, and they just wave their hands and say, “No speak English.” So I shift to Spanish with them, and they look like they just saw God. Sometimes I shift back to English again in the conversation, and that baffled look returns to their face. It’s obvious that they don’t understand a word of it.
Even though I have had four years+ of Spanish in school, and I started studying Spanish when I was six years old, I am typically befuddled by in vivo native Spanish speakers. Around town here, I am around native Spanish speakers all the time. Even if they are standing right next to me, I often cannot understand one single word that they say. Now if I talked to them and got them to slow down their Spanish, we could have a bit of a conversation, but as is, forget it.
I have heard French audio on the Net and in my former town, there were French tourists who came into town a lot. I would often be buying coffee and French speakers would be blabbing away all around me. I can never understand one single word of spoken French.
I haven’t heard much Italian in vivo, but I have heard quite a bit of it on Internet audio and video. Spoken Italian is simply gibberish to me to a large degree. It makes no sense whatsoever.
Usually you can understand a language in audio or video better than in vivo, because speakers on audio and video are more professional speakers and are trained to speak slowly and clearly whereas in vivo, most speech is much more rapid and less clear.
I have also heard Italian on a Youtube video, and it made no sense to me.
Now this is all coming from a guy who is advanced in Spanish.
So obviously I would say that English has 0% intelligibility with all of the Romance languages.
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