Watch your grammatical gender when moving from Spanish to Portuguese or vice versa

An article in Portuguese on words to watch out for when taking Spanish tests shows just how different learning Spanish is for a Portuguese speaker compared to other languages: it's one of those languages that one can have a passive fluency in with very little work at all, but on the other hand this can give one an aversion to spending the necessary time hitting the grammar books to really get into the makeup of the target language. This is especially the case where Portuguese speakers choose Spanish as a second language in school instead of English or something else, as a lot of the time this is due to laziness - those who don't want to study another language choose the easiest one they can find if they have to choose one.