Portuguese

Portuguese is orthographically similar in many ways to Spanish

Portuguese and Spanish are among the most widely spoken languages in the world today.It's not uncommon to find a Portuguese speaker talking to a Spanish speaker at an airport. Each one speaks their own language, both understand each other with just occasional need to stop
now and then to understand the meaning of a word. The speakers communicate very well most of the time, as long as they avoid using slang words or talking too fast.

Communication works because Spanish and Portuguese share around 80% of their vocabulary, most of the same grammatical structures, and things like the endings on nouns and verbs. Where communication breaks down, it's often because of differences in pronunciation. Listen to these two sentences, first in Spanish, then in Portuguese:

"Meus irmãos alemães cantam bem"
"Mis hermanos alemanes cantan bien"

When pronunciation isn't a factor, the Spanish speaker feels almost like he's reading his own language when he picks up a Portuguese newspaper. A recent study found that educated native Spanish speakers with no previous exposure to Portuguese could understand as much as 95% of an academic text written in Portuguese.

Portuguese speakers are generally able to read Spanish, and Spanish speakers are generally able to read Portuguese even if they cannot understand the spoken language.

Interestingly, French is more closely related to Portuguese than it is to Spanish even though Spain has a common boundary with France while Portugal does not. This was probably due to the Portuguese-French Atlantic sea trade, while any exchange between France and Spain was hindered by the Pyrenees Mountains and the totally unrelated Basque language. There are many example of Portuguese words being closer to French than Spanish, such as Portuguese "bom" ("good", masculine), and French "bon," but the somewhat different "buen" in Spanish. Overall, Portuguese and Spanish are more similar to each other than to French.

You may be surprised to hear that Portuguese is the fifth most widely-spoken language in the world. In addition to Portugal, it's the language of Brazil, and one of the few countries in South America where Spanish is not spoken. In Africa, you'll find Portuguese in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and Cape Verde. You can also hear it in Asia in places like the islands of East Timor,
Macao in southern China, and Goa at the tip of India.

So, there are a lot of reasons why you might want to learn Portuguese. Above all, if you speak English and Spanish and you add Portuguese to your repertoire, you'll be able to talk to half the people in the world!