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European vs. Brazilian Portuguese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Sun_Wukong Newbie China Joined 5080 days ago 34 posts - 46 votes Speaks: Portuguese* | Message 9 of 16 03 January 2011 at 5:10am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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It's one of those things I would like to see on mythbusters. People love to exaggerate
it. I majored in Classics but our majors in Humanities as applying to language, literature in linguistics have a different shape (like french Lettres) so I took a lot of classes on portuguese linguistics. One of the professors has actually written papers on this, it's a shame I lost touch with him. If I were you I'd go for whichever of the two feels more attractive. When you are already very profficient, expose yourself to the other through tv programs and movies (not literature). The adaptative period should be tiny. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| marcelobrasil Diglot Groupie Brazil acantoneseblog. Joined 5076 days ago 44 posts - 65 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, English Studies: French, Cantonese | Message 10 of 16 03 January 2011 at 5:48am | IP Logged | ||||||||
It seems to me that your main concern is whether or not your knowledge of Spanish will enable you to understand Portuguese and to what extent Spanish and Portuguese speakers understand one another, or Brazilians and Portuguese people for that matter. Also, you strike me as someone who is interested in learning Portuguese since that , for someone who already knows Spanish, it is a low hanging fruit. Again, the answer is not that straightforward. It really depends on the person. Let me tell you an anedocte : when I lived in Hong Kong, I made friends with a girl from Argentina and some Brazilians. She said that she had trouble understanding my Portuguese, but didn't have much difficulties understanding the other Brazilians.For her, my accent was difficult to understand... There are people who simply have terrible ears and cannot understand anything much different from what they usually hear. And there are other people who are better in trying to make sense out of a different way of speaking. If you think about the US, for instance, there are people who have a really tough time trying to understand immigrants' broken English and there are others who are just used to them and can understand them without much effort. So my final word is : sometimes a Spanish speaker can understand Portuguese well and sometimes he can't and vice-versa. If you're an experienced language learner you will find that you will understand a lot of Portuguese due to your Spanish, but the bottomline is not whether you'll be able to understand it,because most likely you will, rather it is whether you'll be able to speak it. Most learners in this situation tend to mix the two languages when they speak,i.e using Spanish accent when speaking Portuguese or Spanish words instead of Portuguese ones and vice-versa. So you have to beware of those things so that this low hanging fruit advantage will not end up being a hindrance and make you speak some sort of interlanguage. Edited by marcelobrasil on 03 January 2011 at 5:52am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5274 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 11 of 16 03 January 2011 at 6:06am | IP Logged | ||||||||
You're very astute. Well, actually, the situation is something like this. I took up Spanish because I had some background in high school, suspected that given my bilingual background the sounds wouldn't be too hard to produce, because it has a reputation of being "easy," and because it has so many speakers. It's a growing language in the US, will be useful to me in my professional practice, and has a pretty great literature as well (perhaps not as great as English or Russian, but pretty great). So Spanish was a no-brainer. Spanish is going well, I am enjoying it a lot, and my sights are set on other languages, far off in the distance. Of course, I'm not underestimating it and I've come to appreciate that the vocabulary is quite vast, the verbal morphology is complex, and I still need to acquire a better feel for the subjunctive. I do pay a lot of attention to the phonology and over time have observed how some of my earlier ideas about how Spanish sounds align with those of English vs. Serbian vs Bengali were wrong. I constantly try to refine the accent so as to be as close to the Castilian sound (of the Assimil recordings) as possible. I recently obtained a complete Assimil French program and the audio of a Portuguese program (European). If I can get a good grasp of Spanish by the end of this year, I would then go on to either French or Portuguese. Since there's no English base Assimil program for Portuguese, I was unsure if I should first learn French, or, taking advantage of structural (if not phonemic) similarities to Spanish, go straight to Portuguese. If I do French first, I can use a French base Assimil to go through Brazilian Portuguese, but with Spanish I can only do European Portuguese. To be honest, I've listened to both varieties and prefer the sound of European Portuguese. I am not looking to merely "make myself understood" using Spanish to speak to Lusophones or to use a vehicle of Spanish comprehension to understand spoken Portuguese. If I go about learning Portuguese, I want to acquire a native- like accent (yes, a lofty goal), acquire a vast vocabulary, grammar, read the classic literature (e.g. Os Lusíadas), etc. So I would very much take Portuguese on its own terms. I just wanted to clarify if the European and Brazilian were mutually intelligible because I wouldn't want to learn the former if Brazilians would find me incomprehensible in the way a Pole might find a Russian (as some would make the case appear). So you and Sun and ellasevia have really helped me in this respect. I think I'll probably do the French first, and then the European Portuguese afterwards. Thank you. Edited by Merv on 03 January 2011 at 6:14am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| marcelobrasil Diglot Groupie Brazil acantoneseblog. Joined 5076 days ago 44 posts - 65 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English Studies: French, Cantonese | Message 12 of 16 03 January 2011 at 6:07am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Just one little suggestion : if you do decide to tackle Portuguese, make sure you get your grammar straight. Like Sun Wukong,in this case, concentrate on tv, movies and buy some books on Spanish/Portuguese false friends and even if you are not to fond of grammar and are more of a natural learner, like myself, do study some grammar and get it straight.
I decided to study Spanish a little more seriously and the other day was reading Ortega y Gasset's classic La Rebelion de Las Massas, a book on political philosophy. With the help of a dictionary I really didn't have any trouble at all understanding it. On the other hand, the other day I was talking to that friend from Argentina on msn and decided to write in Spanish. So , describing my trip to Argentina , I wrote : Yo he gustado de Buenos Aires Upon which she said : typicall Brazilian mistake... It should be : a mi me gustó Buenos Aires. Well, I could read philosophy in Spanish but couldn't say correctly '' I liked Buenos Aires'', which is not exacly the most difficult phrase in the world. That made me think... 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5274 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 13 of 16 03 January 2011 at 6:14am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Perhaps I am wrong, but I believe he gustado de is a legitimate archaic way of saying it in Spanish. It's probably died out, though. Yesterday I learned that it is no longer permissible to write things like "lo que fue hecho por..." to express the passive voice in the past tense, and I was doing so based on a Spanish text printed in 1960, so clearly the language has involved quite a bit since then! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| nuriayasmin Senior Member Germany Joined 5244 days ago 155 posts - 210 votes | Message 14 of 16 03 January 2011 at 10:16am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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When Portuguese courses are offered in Germany, they usually have either Brazilian or European Portuguese while I've never seen such info added to a Spanish course. I've always learnt and spoken Brazilian Portuguese because my kids' father is Brazilian and we lived in São Paulo for about two years in the late 1990's. Although I totally gave up Portugese after our separation and after I had returned to Germany (I've only recently been re-starting to learn Portuguese), I still understand about 90% when Brazilians talk. European Portugese is a completely different issue for me. Last year I spent my holidays in Portugal and first I hardly understood anything. It was all right, though when I asked people to talk slowly. At the hotel they called me "a brasileira" and I just didn't manage to switch from "você" to "tu" and "a senhora/o senhor". I imagine it's easier for someone who learnt European Portuguese to understand Brazilians because I think they usually speak clearer - that's my impression at least.
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| Durben Diglot Groupie Portugal Joined 6620 days ago 42 posts - 45 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English Studies: German | Message 15 of 16 03 January 2011 at 12:53pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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As a native european portuguese speaker I confirm a lot of what was said previously:
The portuguese will understand pretty much was it is said by brazilians as we have a lot of exposure to brazilian shows (novelas) in portugal. Some brazilians will have some difficulties to understand us. It happened to me when I whent to northwest of Brazil, as I had sometimes to slow down a little bit, but nothing serious. All of those situations were easily solved with more interaction. I've read and interview of a Brazilian girl who emigrated to Portugal, and at the beggining she was fired from several jobs because she couldn't understand us. After some weeks the integration was complete and she did integrate pretty well. But to see ao easy is the interaction a lot of the jobs here in Portugal regarding shopping, hotels, food is now fulled of brazilians who after some time with us don't have any trouble getting it. The only time I had a hard time to understand Brazilian was in the beggining og the movie "City of God" (one of the best movies I ever seen btw), I had to adjust my brain for a few minutes to the pronunciation and slang used there, but after the first 10-15 minutes I was able to see it without any kind of trouble :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| marcelobrasil Diglot Groupie Brazil acantoneseblog. Joined 5076 days ago 44 posts - 65 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English Studies: French, Cantonese | Message 16 of 16 03 January 2011 at 6:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
It's probably a lot easier to a Portuguese to understand a Brazilian than the other way around. And the reason, it seems to me, is not something related to the the language per se, but it boils downn to exposure to the other : as it was said before, Brazilian soap operas and I believe Brazilian music too, though I'm not sure on this one, are quite popular in Portugal, so they are already used to hearing Brazilians, whereas Portuguese culture(movies, music, tv shows,etc.) is pretty non-existant here in Brazil. Merv said before that he had heard that the gap between Brazilian Portuguesex European Portuguese is larger than the one concerning American English x British English. The reason for this perception is that Americans and British people are much more exposed to each other's culture than Brazilian and Portuguese people. It's nothing to do with the language per se. Edited by marcelobrasil on 03 January 2011 at 6:13pm 8 persons have voted this message useful |
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