But once accepting this favourite type of comparison, I would say that (standard) Italian and Spanish are way closer to each other than Bangla and (standard) Hindi. The comparisons "like Italian and Spanish/French" are always very rough and misleading. Grammar comparison at random : H "maiM ne dekhaa" x B "ami dekhechhi", "dekhlam", H "maiM dekh rahaa huuM" x "ami dekhchhi". "ab" x "ekhon", "rupiyaa" x "Taka", "hai" x "achhe" - so basic words!). You could make an equally misleading list that would display words that are entirely different in Hindi and Bangla. The word-list cited above could be a bit misleading in that it picks many words that are shared accross the languages. sh, some very basic and loosy ideas of regular singular/plural noun endings in direct case and regular verb endings in present tense, something that one would learn in lesson 1 or lesson 2 with two or three weeks, nothing fancy, can he have a slow conversation with a speaker of and have a rough understanding of a news article in the other language? (like Spanish and Italian) Or does he still need formal study of the other language in order to do that? (like Spanish and French) If one has learned one of Hindi and Bengali and knows some rough and basic correspondences in pronounciation between Hindi and Bengali, say, schwa o, s / s' / s. But when I was in my Italian class, with my Spanish, when the teacher was speaking "reeeeaaaallllyyyyy slooowwwwllllllyyyyyy", we could have a conversation (he in Italian and I in Spanish), with contents way beyond lesson 1 or 2, and I could also get some general idea when reading a news article about an earthquake in Italy. When I only spoke Spanish and knew only a little bit of French, I could not have a conversation in French nor could I understand a French article. As for Italian, I haven't really tried to study it seriously yet, except several weeks of class, which gave me some very basic ideas. I studied Spanish first, then French, and I still remember how French was to me when I only spoke Spanish and knew only a little bit of French. The same is not true for Hindi speakers, who don't typically speak/understand Bangla unless they have some connection to Bengal. This has more to do with social factors than language mutual intelligibility. Obviously the scripts are different, but just like with Spanish and French, the cognate pairs greatly facilitate reading comprehension, though the spoken languages sound so different.Ī lot of Bengali speakers have a great passive understanding of Hindi and may or may not be able to speak it well, but many can indeed speak Hindi. It took some time for my ears to adjust and some study of the language before I could understand more.
![bengali alphabet vs hindi bengali alphabet vs hindi](https://omniglot.com/images/writing/bengali3.gif)
I worked in Bangladesh before and when I first arrived everything just sounded like /o/ and /sh/. I speak Hindi as an L2 as well as a little bit of Bangla. There are innumerous cognate pairs but the pronunciation is so different that one cannot easily understand spoken Bangla just from knowing Hindi.
![bengali alphabet vs hindi bengali alphabet vs hindi](https://www.languageshome.com/Hindi-Bengali.gif)
I would say it's more like Spanish-French.