[celeryd]

Do you find there's a similarity between Spanish and Russian? In my limited experience, Russians who speak Spanish also seem to speak it quite well.

[afiodorov]

The phonetic similarity between Russian and Spanish is a huge relief. As a Russian speaker, pronouncing English has always felt like a workout for my mouth; the sounds are completely alien. Spanish, on the other hand, is effortless. It just flows, since I'm using the same phonetic toolkit I grew up with.

[madaxe_again]

Yeah, I have the opposite problem, being a native English speaker living in Portugal - to my ear, I’ll say something perfectly coherent and pronounced exactly as the locals do - and they won’t understand a bloody word. It isn’t just the phonemes, it’s the cadence - syllabic vs rhythmic stress. I’ll be like “um galão” and they’ll be like “galão?”, “sim, um galão”, “um… que? Galão?”, “sim, galão”, “ahhh, um galão!” and I just can’t seem to be understood.

My wife is a native Russian speaker, and despite making numerous grammatical errors is far better understood than I am.

German, I have no such problem despite being far weaker at the language imo.