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A strange language occurrence

Last weekend, thanks to an incredibly cheap flight, I took a trip to Turin, Italy.

Having never been to Italy before, I was pretty excited – especially about the food. In order to get this food though, I would have to order it, so I decided to try and pick up some Italian words and phrases.

Unfortunately, as I’ve been learning Spanish recently, my brain kept defaulting to por favor rather than per favore and ¿Habla inglés? rather than parla inglese?

As both Spanish and Italian are Romance languages derived from Latin, there are some similarities in words. Also I have been told it’s fairly easy to pick up Italian if you know Spanish and vice versa. So perhaps it is not surprising that my brain jumped to words that seemed close to what I was hearing.

Has anyone else had this experience?