Quote Originally Posted by brett
I agree, Aaa, with pretty much everything you said. I mentioned that my French helped my Spanish. But, so did my English. If you combine English and French, you have both the French/Spanish grammatical/lexical similarity covered, AND with English you've already gotten used to the pronunciation. Because we (English speakers) have almost all the same letters and sounds as Spanish. Accent allowing, of course. Only the 'j', 'g' and 'double L' are different. And a very minor difference, the 'z' in Spanish is like 's'. But English uses 's' and 'z' sounds for its letter 'S' , so that's not too much of a leap of faith for an English speaker to get used to the Spanish 'z' being pronounced that way. Maybe it'd take a bit of practice saying Spain's spanish 'c' and TH. But still, it's pretty minor. So, Portuguese and Spanish speakers must find each others language a quick step, so long as they pay it some attention.
I know two people trying Pimsleur for Spanish, they both think "muy" is hard to say.

I told them that you can say "moy", or "mwee", or anything in between, and you'll be intelligible, and there will be some native speaker in some local dialect who says it the same way.