I recently had a conversation with a native Spanish speaker who lived in Japan and spoke Japanese fairly fluently. He said the exact same thing, it was surprising how similar they can be in this regard
Spanish and Japanese use the same sounds. For the most part, anyway; there are probably a few exceptions. This was unexpected and utterly blew my mind as a native Spanish speaker when I took Japanese lessons.
Take the longest, most complicated Japanese word. Write it out in romaji (Latin letters). And ask a native Spanish speaker to pronounce it. One who knows nothing of Japanese. They’ll pronounce it pretty much correctly. I was fascinated.
This is also why, to me, rapidly spoken natural Spanish and Japanese sound oddly similar if I hear it out of “the corner” of my ear, so to speak.
Which is funny cause I kinda speak Spanish lol
I recently had a conversation with a native Spanish speaker who lived in Japan and spoke Japanese fairly fluently. He said the exact same thing, it was surprising how similar they can be in this regard
Spanish and Japanese use the same sounds. For the most part, anyway; there are probably a few exceptions. This was unexpected and utterly blew my mind as a native Spanish speaker when I took Japanese lessons.
Take the longest, most complicated Japanese word. Write it out in romaji (Latin letters). And ask a native Spanish speaker to pronounce it. One who knows nothing of Japanese. They’ll pronounce it pretty much correctly. I was fascinated.