The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[eggyk]

This is really interesting because, as an Italian who studied Spanish in middle school and only has a basic understanding of it, I can confidently say that I understand roughly 70–80% of what the girl in the video is saying without any problems, even though I’ve never studied or really had any exposure to either Brazilian or European Portuguese.  What’s your native language? What other languages do you speak? Just curious about it 

I speak (British) English as my mother tongue, and Dutch as a second language. I did learn a decent amount of french back in school but i've lost most of it. Lets just say that in cases where i'm trying to work out the instructions on food packaging with no english or dutch, I can just about get almost everything by looking at the french and german instructions and mixing the words I understand together.   With other romance languages, I understand a few shared latin words like estudar, informatica etc. 

When I look at that correct transcript, completely honestly without google translating I get something like: 
"... my name is marilia ... (my age is?) 32 years ... in? brazil in the interior (centre?) of sao paulo ... ... 14 years that? live no ... ... ... study ... what professor of portguese and spanish ... is .. primary/first? ... that I go? ... Uruguay ... ... ... other? places? and that something's me ... ... here?"

but with the german, again without auto translate: 
"'Home'? In german 'Home' has basically two (main meanings?), as far as I understand. And heavy? someone can say: 'Home' in the sense 'I am at home', was basically meant as: 'I am ... there?, where? I ... live'. Many are ... not so very therewith? connected, where they ... live. And then that gives ... also 'Home' in the sense of: 'I go home to my ...', or..."

I would also say that I understood more than I could phonetically write with the portuguese example. I wrote a butchered "trente dewes unyos", but did genuinely understand "thirty-two years" when I heard it. With the german example, my knowledge of dutch is basically carrying the entire thing: "viele = veel", "wohnen=wonen", "Noch = nog", "eigentlich = eigenlijk","ich gehe nach = ik ga naar" etc etc. I imagine that every person doing this will have a different experience. Perhaps, if you don't speak german, you will struggle more with that compared to the portuguese?