Trust me, I understand what you mean, but it is not the same.
I don't mean to brag, but I speak fluent Spanish, and I studied Italian, French, and Latin for four years. I never studied Portuguese, but I can read probably 50% of it and grasp about 70% of its meaning. Romanian looks a lot more like Latin, so I used to be able to spot some words in it, as well. My Latin is rusty these days, though.
The difference between Classical Latin is that word meaning is very different, even though it looks similar. You can't go from a modern Romance language and back, but you can go from Classical/Vernacular Latin forward.
Even Latin speakers would sometimes get confused which words were accusative and nominative cases in complex sentence structures. The easiest ones are genitive, ablative, and dative, but try reading literature that is long, and it starts getting complicated to parse who is doing the action to what.
Not to mention the noun declensions, which are completely nonexistent in all modern Romance languages.
You're right. There are a lot of cognates. But in first year Latin we are taught and given exams on false cognates, so I guess I always treated each cognate carefully because our prof was always trying to trick us!
In translation class, we were taught about false friends, so this added to my paranoia probably.
I don't mean to brag, but I speak fluent Spanish, and I studied Italian, French, and Latin for four years. I never studied Portuguese, but I can read probably 50% of it and grasp about 70% of its meaning. Romanian looks a lot more like Latin, so I used to be able to spot some words in it, as well. My Latin is rusty these days, though.
The difference between Classical Latin is that word meaning is very different, even though it looks similar. You can't go from a modern Romance language and back, but you can go from Classical/Vernacular Latin forward.
Even Latin speakers would sometimes get confused which words were accusative and nominative cases in complex sentence structures. The easiest ones are genitive, ablative, and dative, but try reading literature that is long, and it starts getting complicated to parse who is doing the action to what.
Not to mention the noun declensions, which are completely nonexistent in all modern Romance languages.