Jose Mourinho don't impress me much, and what is it with butterflies?

We, the English-speaking peoples, assume that each language is different, and you either speak it or you don't. That's our experience of learning.

There's no other language where we would follow the gist without having studied it. People sometimes say Frisian. Best of luck.

For many non-English speakers this is not the case. The Scandinavians can understand each other, the various branches of the Slavic languages are mutually intelligible, Hindi/Urdu etc.

A Spanish friend recently told me that he could understand around 70% of Portuguese and Italian, though he'd never had a lesson in either.

Check it out. Here's how you say "it is a cat":

Spanish: Es un gato
Portuguese: É um gato
Italian: È un gatto

Come on, you're not even trying to make it different! These aren't different languages, these are accents!

One of the reasons why Jose Mourinho can speak five languages (English, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French) is that three of them are pretty much the same.

Speaks about 2.5 languages

So while native English speakers are rubbish at learning languages, that's partly because there are no quick wins for us. Any new language is harder for an English-speaker than Spanish, Portuguese or French would for the Italian.

However. Whichever language you come from you need to buckle down and learn the word for butterfly. It's completely different in each major European language.

Look at spider, nice and easy:

Fr: araignée

Sp: araña

It: ragno

German goes with "Spinne", which is fine - you can see the common root with English (and obviously arachnid with the Romance "languages"). 

But check out the humble butterfly. What the fuck's going on here?

Eng: butterfly

Fr: papillon

Sp: mariposa

It: farfalla 

Ger: Schmetterling

Why did we all feel the need to make up our own word for this guy?