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Portuguese speakers understand Spanish? | ||
Tags: Portuguese | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4848 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 1 of 16 23 May 2013 at 4:49am | IP Logged | ||
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To all the Portuguese speakers: are you able to understand Spanish? I ask because I'm studying Portuguese, but I'm travelling to Spain in December. (Unfortunately I don't have the time to go to Portugal while I'm there.) I've heard that Portuguese speakers can understand Spanish, but not the other way around. I'm just a beginner in Portuguese, but I wonder if my Portuguese knowledge would be of any help in understanding some basic things.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| FireViN Diglot Senior Member Brazil missaoitaliano.wordpRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5230 days ago 196 posts - 292 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishC2 Studies: Italian | Message 2 of 16 23 May 2013 at 10:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, I understand almost everything if I pay attention, even though some people speak lightning fast - that's a lot harder to understand. Dubbed television shows (i.e History Channel) are very very easy to understand, since they speak very slowly. Reading is easy. Speaking not so much. I have a Colombian professor and she says that Portuguese was not very hard to understand.
I'm sure your Portuguese will help you understand more than just basic things. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| fabriciocarraro Hexaglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Brazil russoparabrasileirosRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4716 days ago 989 posts - 1454 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French Studies: Dutch, German, Japanese | Message 3 of 16 23 May 2013 at 11:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Just like FireVin, for me it's also very easy to understand Spanish. To give you a good example, my wife is Russian but speaks fluent Portuguese now. By July 2011 we went to Russia, and we stopped in Madrid for 24h. I left her go shopping and went my own way to get to know the city, and she managed to buy clothes and food with no problem whatsoever, and even speaking in Portuguese slowly. Edited by fabriciocarraro on 23 May 2013 at 11:09pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Luso Hexaglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 6062 days ago 819 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, French, EnglishC2, GermanB1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical) | Message 4 of 16 23 May 2013 at 11:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, without any problem.
If you understand Castilian Spanish (the accent we are most exposed to), it's even easier to understand most American Spanish accents. And of course, everyone speaks Portunhol. :p Near the border (the "raia") most people are bilingual. Whether you speak your language or (as a courtesy) you speak the language of the place you're in. For instance, if you're in Elvas, speak Portuguese. In Badajoz, Spanish. Between Portuguese and Galician it's even easier: you just speak your language normally and assume the other guy will get it (which, for the most part, is a correct assumption). But I digress: that's not Spanish. I know, I know... Edited by Luso on 23 May 2013 at 11:34pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5263 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 5 of 16 24 May 2013 at 2:10am | IP Logged | ||
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I was speaking Portuguese to my Puerto Rican neighbor the other day and she understood almost everything I said, though she didn't get Brazilian slang. I was trying to show her that she didn't understand as much as she thought. I used the word bafunfa for "cash", which she didn't know, but if I had said "dinheiro" she would have obviously known. She asked me to make a DVD of a Brazilian novela I'm watching. She watched it, enjoyed it and said she understood most of it. She even asked me for the next three episodes! Obviously, she's going to miss a lot of it but she'll get the gist and will probably end up learning a lot of Portuguese passively.
When I went to Brazil last year, I flew on COPA. COPA is a Panamanian airline. All the flight crew were Panamanians and they had no trouble communicating on a basic level with the largely Brazilian passengers, and vice-versa. By the time you get to Spain in December, kuji, you'll be that much further along in your Portuguese studies. If you keep being consistent and persistent you may well be on level 4 of DLI and at a low/mid intermediate level- which will make your Portuguese even more useful. A couple of weeks before you go, I'd take the opportunity to familiarize myself with the language a bit. You'll get pretty good at portunhol quickly. I believe your experience as a speaker of Portuguese will be quite satisfying, a much better experience than what a typical monolingual English-speaker would have. Edited by iguanamon on 24 May 2013 at 2:13am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 6 of 16 24 May 2013 at 5:43am | IP Logged | ||
It's like... in many cases the Portuguese speakers prefer using a Spanish version of something to an English one, but Spanish speakers never need to worry about that. Anything I can't find in a more interesting language is available in Spanish :P 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4848 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 7 of 16 24 May 2013 at 6:50am | IP Logged | ||
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Wow, this is all very interesting stuff... and coincidentally very encouraging for my Portuguese studies. Thank you for the replies!
In a related note, the other day I was listening online to a radio station from Puerto Rico. I was surprised that I could understand a tiny bit of what the DJs were saying in Spanish. I don't know if it is because I study Portuguese and the words are similar, or perhaps because studying Portuguese somehow activated some of the vocabulary I learned when I took Spanish class in high school (although that was 17 years ago!), or both. Edited by kujichagulia on 24 May 2013 at 6:55am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| HopeTea Newbie Japan Joined 4272 days ago 37 posts - 41 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 8 of 16 25 May 2013 at 1:35am | IP Logged | ||
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Nothing at all to add, just wanted to say I envy you for being able to go to Spain for any amount of time. :)
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