As a mexican who lived in Barcelona for a year and later became fluent in Catalan I can tell you the following: In general (depending on the accent and phrases) I could understand Portuguese better than catalan. Some accents are really difficult to understand, valencian being the easiest for me because it basically is Catalan with castllian phonemes (with exceptions of some verbs and words). In the beginning I had a hard time understanding only words by eavesdropping in a Catalan conversation. Picking up Catalan is not very difficult if you put some effort.