She speaks Italian, so she would have no problem with Spanish. Why do some politicians think that saying a few words of Spanish badly will make Hispanic voters like them? Isn’t that patronizing?
RATs do the same thing with black people. Remember Hillary always doing that? AOC and Kamala have too.
It iS patronizing, and it makes them the butt of jokes among members of their target audience.
Italian, French, Portuguese, and Spanish are all “romance” languages and have many similarities, but English, German, and Dutch are just as closely related.
A native speaker of any one of the tongues above will pick up a few words of the other language family members, but learning how to correctly communicate in one of the others in its language family is a LOT of work. Outside the language family it’s even MORE difficult, but some folks are gifted.
I don’t think that Jill has the polyglot gift...