CalvinIsAwesome wrote: italian and spanish are very similar. if you can speak one, you can speak most of the other.
They are similar to the degree that if you can read one of them, you will be able to understand the others.
Speaking one of the languages and being understood by the others is not that easy.
In my experience Italians understand Spanish, but not vice versa. Portuguese is another matter altogether. It looks almost like Spanish on paper, but is pronounced more like Russian. You won't understand a word of the spoken language even if you're an expert in the other Romance languages. - Talking about European Spanish and Portuguese, of course.