Sorry for the english, it's easier for me:

My opinion, correct me if I[m wrong:

When looking at Portuguese, although it at first sounds different, it's pretty close to a straight conversion from Spanish, correct?? Sure, you can't understand a word if you haven't worked on it, but it's pretty close to a one-to-one conversion of sounds. If you have "ll", substitute "ch". If it ends in "un", use "um". Things like that. Spend a week or a month practicing the conversions, and you're good to go, right? I mean, there are *very* few lexical differences, once those conversions are used.

Here's a link on that:

http://alfarrabio.um.geira.pt/spl/rules.html

I look over a few basic portuguese lessons, and they're totally understandable, almost all the words are the same or close. I'd think if a spanish speaker spent a week iof study on it, they'd be in good shape. With *no* study, yeah, I'd bet there's problems.

Italian *sounds* more like spanish, but there are more lexical differences, I think? More *different* words and different usages. Easy to read and pronounce, but more vocabulary to learn.

As for Portugese speakers understanding spanish, I'm not surprised. There are many more spanish speakers, I'd think they maybe had some exposure to Spanish tv, etc., and were more comfortable with the conversion.

As for French speakers catching on to some spanish: French drops a LOT of consonants, or mutes them, making it a bit harder for others to learn. But spanish says them all (except h), and so spoken spanish might be more intelligible to french speakers than vice versa. Just guessing on this one.