Languages with closely related dialects ? (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

Languages with closely related dialects ?
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Language Learning Forum : General discussion

35 messages over 5 pages: 1 2 3 4 5

Medulin
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Croatia
Joined 4668 days ago
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Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese
Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali

Message 33 of 35

20 July 2012 at 12:52pm | IP Logged

Serpent wrote:

Yeah, but you said you hadn't *heard* mejicano.
And afaiu the RAE accepts regional variation? Makes sense. IMO it doesn't matter much for the learner whether certain things are accepted by the institution or if he/she will every now and then have to say things that are officially considered wrong.

Anyway, sounds like you've settled on Portuguese already. Good luck! Apart from learning the tu-form, I don't think you'll have to do any significant adjusting if you speak to people from Portugal.
Random but when I was recently watching football and wrote "golo!" on twitter, a Brazilian follower replied to me in Spanish. He assumed I had learned it before Portuguese like most learners do, although in Spanish, like in Brazilian Portuguese, you actually say "gol" :) He didn't know it's "golo" in Europe. Just an anecdote, but I suppose as you're not a native speaker, any possible misunderstandings will be attributed to your Spanish.

Brazilians don't normally use TU with the Portuguese, (unless their dialect uses TU, for example the dialect of Maranhão), so learners of Brazilian Portuguese should not do it either. In some soeciolects of Continental Portuguese, VOCÊ is used as an informal pronoun (the posh dialect of Cascais, and the dialect of Algarve, where they use VOCÊ with children, as in: COMA PEIXINHO ''eat fish!'')
The Portuguese people prefer the genuine Brazilian Portuguese to Lusofied Brazilian Portuguese...Some Brazilians living in Portugal do the best to sound like Portuguese, saying things like ESTOU A CHEGAR A CASA (em vez de ESTOU CHEGANDO EM CASA), but many Portuguese people find it weird and fake. When Portuguese people say: TU ESTÁS A FALAR BRASILEIRO to a Brazilian or foreigners learning BR PT, they don't mean to downgrade the language, calling it Brasileiro instead of Português, by brasileiro they mean: the Brazilian dialect/accent. The Portuguese people understand Brazilian Portuguese perfectly (although some of them may not be familiar with some informal expressions), therefore there is no reason to be ashamed of speaking in Brazilian Portuguese in Portugal. When I went to Madeira and spoke Brazilian Portuguese, and everyone understood me. They thought I was a Brazilian LOL

Edited by Medulin on 20 July 2012 at 1:01pm
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Serpent
Octoglot
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Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
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Message 34 of 35

20 July 2012 at 1:39pm | IP Logged

I see... It was just based on my experience, as I always use você with Brazilians. THEY might also call things incorrect when it's actually just the European way which they've not had much exposure to.
Also, the OP was just craving to hear about any possible problems lolol so I mentioned the only thing that came to my mind.

Now I wonder what my Portuguese friends think of me... I'm following many funny twitter accounts from Brazil (highly recommended, but make sure to disable the RT's! They promote one another all the time) and I add the best tweets to Anki (instead of adding them to favourites :D) It's had an influence on my Portuguese for sure, though IDK how significant.
1 person has voted this message useful

Jappy58
Bilingual Super Polyglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4638 days ago
200 posts - 413 votes

Speaks: Spanish*, Guarani*, Arabic (Levantine), Arabic (Egyptian), Arabic (Maghribi), Arabic (Written), French, English, Persian, Quechua, Portuguese
Studies: Modern Hebrew

Message 35 of 35

20 July 2012 at 3:55pm | IP Logged

98789 wrote:

I was going to write "read" but I thought it might sound a bit pretentious ("a 5 years old colombian guy reading about "Méjico" ? He's trying to impress us" -probably it's not really impressive, but I supposed at least one person could take me wrong- ... anyways I just used to see the country flags in the backcover of a dictionary :lol: ) So I decided to use something less "intelectual" and see!... I wrote something stupid!

And well, all this started because of arabic. I once wanted to try it, but at the beginning of the course was clarified that arabic is quite different from country to country and how you would probably not be understood, that it should be considered different languages, later read it here ...
and I started to feel afraid about that.

Thanks for responding,
and yes, I think I'll give a try to (brasilian) portuguese, then, Italian.

Well, as far as Arabic goes, all the Middle Eastern dialects (Egyptian, Sudanese, Levantine, Iraqi, Hijazi, Gulf, etc.) have a lot in common and to be honest, are not really different languages. The main division is between the Middle Eastern dialects and the Maghrebi dialects. If you were to learn a Middle Eastern dialect, the truth is that you would be understood (especially if it were Egyptian or Levantine) throughout most of the Arab world, same goes for MSA. The differences are more notable "region to region" rather than "country to country". Yes, there are differences from country to country but they're not very large on that scale - country to country differences are comparable to differences between Spanish dialects, while region to region they're a little more different from one another than American and British English. So, although you're choosing Portuguese (an excellent choice), I wouldn't be scared of Arabic later on.

Again, Portuguese is a great choice, and I'm currentlu studying it as well. You'll find that it is quite fun to explore the language and culture, and how it differs from Spanish as well. :)

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