This paper explores how factors like age and home language affect Portuguese L2 students' verbal reasoning and vocabulary tasks. In alphabetic languages (Romance languages), immigrant students (in a L2 learning context) with a potent linguistic distance (a home language with a highly varied orthographic base) are awaited to flounder in language acquisition despite awareness of skill enhancing strategies. Home language, not age, seems to notably portend disparity in student's results. Alphasyllabary (Indo-Aryan languages) L1 speakers appear the worst performers, as clarified by their languages' ‘linguistic distance’.