I find her comment that a Portuguese person listening to Brazilian needing a moment to recalibrate isn't quite right. I find it tends to be the other way around. People in Portugal are exposed to...
I find her comment that a Portuguese person listening to Brazilian needing a moment to recalibrate isn't quite right. I find it tends to be the other way around. People in Portugal are exposed to a lot of Brazilian media, especially from telenovelas and music. There are also a lot of Brazilians living in Portugal, especially the big cities. Not so much the other way around. Basically Brazil is to Portugal what the US is to England. Except maybe we're more open to adopting the other country's spelling conventions.
I would say it takes a moment for me to perform the mental switch to start understanding European Portuguese. But it's pretty fast. Off topic, but I love they way the Portuguese speak. I once...
I would say it takes a moment for me to perform the mental switch to start understanding European Portuguese. But it's pretty fast.
Off topic, but I love they way the Portuguese speak. I once edited a documentary for a Portuguese sommelier and I spoke like them weeks.
Funny story about this sort of thing: when I was a kid I used to watch a lot of dodgy streams for soccer games online (I still do, but I used to, too). A lot of times the streams were in Russian...
Funny story about this sort of thing: when I was a kid I used to watch a lot of dodgy streams for soccer games online (I still do, but I used to, too). A lot of times the streams were in Russian or some other Eastern-European-sounding language that little ten-year-old Brazilian me couldn't understand.
One day I was watching one of these streams, not understanding anything the Russian commentators were saying. Until after like 10-15 minutes of watching, they said something that made my brain go "hey wait a second, I understood that... how could I understand it if it's in Russian?". Then that's when my brain clicked and I realized that it was Portuguese Portuguese. And from that moment on I could understand everything the commentators were saying. I seriously watched at least like ten minutes without having a clue that it was in my first language. It was like a switch had been flipped.
In my defense, I just assumed it was Russian like many other streams typically were (at least I think they were Russian, now I'm not so sure lol), and like 99.9% of the Portuguese I had heard at that point in my life was Brazilian Portuguese. So yeah, Portuguese Portuguese sounds very Eastern European to me.
I feel the spirit of Mitch Hedberg moving through this thread. To throw in my two cents as someone who doesn't speak Portuguese but speaks just enough Spanish to get himself into trouble, every...
(I still do, but I used to, too)
I feel the spirit of Mitch Hedberg moving through this thread.
To throw in my two cents as someone who doesn't speak Portuguese but speaks just enough Spanish to get himself into trouble, every time I hear Brazilian Portuguese it sounds like an American speaking Spanish with a strong American accent. I don't know why that's just what my ear hears.
If it makes you feel any better, even Eastern Europeans can get confused. I've had Polish people and Russians come up to me and start speaking in their language after hearing me speak in...
If it makes you feel any better, even Eastern Europeans can get confused. I've had Polish people and Russians come up to me and start speaking in their language after hearing me speak in Portuguese. Also I'm not on reddit anymore but r/PORTUGALCYKABLYAT is pretty funny
"Portugal is essentially a Brazilian language that also happens to be spoken in Portugal and eight other countries" I totally get it but oh boy don't let the Portuguese see that. Also I wonder how...
"Portugal is essentially a Brazilian language that also happens to be spoken in Portugal and eight other countries" I totally get it but oh boy don't let the Portuguese see that.
Also I wonder how much the similarities to Spanish take away from potential Portuguese learners. Both languages are very similar to the point where speaking one can get you by in a country that speaks the other, so if you're going to learn one, might as well learn the one that is spoken in more countries. If you ever find yourself in Brazil as a Spanish speaker you'd probably do just fine anyways, so why bother learning Portuguese unless you have some other reason to (like a family member you want to speak to or if you plan on living somewhere that speaks it).
Too late, I've already seen it! I don't have an easy time understanding Spanish, especially if spoken by a native in a casual context. Spanish speakers speak very quickly and it's difficult to...
Too late, I've already seen it!
I don't have an easy time understanding Spanish, especially if spoken by a native in a casual context. Spanish speakers speak very quickly and it's difficult to parse what they're saying. It's a bit like how accents give me trouble even in English, a language that, unlike Spanish, I have used extensively.
Brazilian portuguese on the other hand gives me no trouble at all as a baseline. The trouble from Brazilian speakers are those highly specific words at the slang level, such as but not limited to indigenous-originated words or loanwords we don't have in Portugal, which I just don't know the meaning of. Since it's a vocabulary problem, being forced to use Brazilian Portuguese translations in media is infuriating because I will not be able to understand them well, but in conversation it's easy to work around the problem.
P.S.: Foreigners who conflate linguistic and cultural similarity also make asses of themselves by coming here and asking for Tapas restaurants. We don't do Tapas. You're in the wrong country. Research for five minutes before booking your vacation!
A favorite quip of mine from the Big Bang Theory, when Koothrapali pointed out that over a billion Indians speak English, so actually, it's the Americans who have the accent.
A favorite quip of mine from the Big Bang Theory, when Koothrapali pointed out that over a billion Indians speak English, so actually, it's the Americans who have the accent.
Some comments in no particular order: Of course Portugal can't grow its native speaker count through demographics. We have been a developed country for several decades, with the ageing/reduction...
Some comments in no particular order:
Of course Portugal can't grow its native speaker count through demographics. We have been a developed country for several decades, with the ageing/reduction in birth count that goes with it. Ideally we should be able to keep our population stable on our own, but it's in fact decreasing sharply (minus recent immigration) because we are so bad at managing ourselves we make life here nearly unsustainable for younger generations.
She's surprisingly bad at pronouncing all those country names!
Also, it felt like the video was written by someone who mostly understood the assignment (or by AI? They certainly used AI for the visuals), but she sometimes robbed it of sense by reading words incorrectly. Take the line about "obrigado": It is correct, but no, we don't pronounce it "brigade". That's how an english speaker would pronounce the written rendering of how a portuguese speaker would pronounce it...
During Estado Novo (the 20th century far right dictatorship) in Portugal, the party line was strongly pro-colonial, and portuguese people fought and died in overseas wars to hold on to our colonies. After the 1974 revolution the pendum swung toward a strong anti-colonial sentiment, which would have percluded any efforts to spread our language as a global language overseas as very distasteful. I feel like we only started getting over that trauma in the 90s. We did harmonize (by treaty) the way portuguese is written in literature with the other portuguese speaking countries. I can't judge if the changes were good or bad, but kids are taught the new version of the language, so it is what it is.
A better version of this video might mention the Dutch as a primary reason for the erosion of the portuguese empire before mentioning the Spanish, English or French. Not mentioning the Dutch (who, unlike the Spanish, competed directly against the Portuguese) just because their language doesn't have much of a global presence feels dishonest; in fact, I would rather like to hear an explanation of why things turned out different for them!
I got a little suspicious of this too. There was some odd AI-typical phrasing ("not just X, but also Y"). But I also noticed a couple places where there were grammatical errors and the speaker...
it felt like the video was written by someone who mostly understood the assignment (or by AI? They certainly used AI for the visuals)
I got a little suspicious of this too. There was some odd AI-typical phrasing ("not just X, but also Y"). But I also noticed a couple places where there were grammatical errors and the speaker just blazed right through them without seeming to notice (6:57: "scattered across the map in a way that makes the total hard visualize as one thing"). Kinda odd.
Even dedicated English speakers cannot pronounce Portuguese. My guess is that it is difficult for them to overcome their knowledge of Spanish. Their brains naturally go to Spanish as a reference,...
She's surprisingly bad at pronouncing all those country names!
Even dedicated English speakers cannot pronounce Portuguese. My guess is that it is difficult for them to overcome their knowledge of Spanish. Their brains naturally go to Spanish as a reference, and by doing so, they cannot achieve correct Portuguese pronunciation. Spanish is similar enough to work as a reference but different enough to lead them astray.
There is also the issue of the nasal sounds, which, with the exception of a few specific words, both English and Spanish lack.
Might be. I don't know enough spanish to be able to tell if that's the kind of influence her pronunciation has. It sounds more to me like she's all in on her english speaker's accent!
Might be. I don't know enough spanish to be able to tell if that's the kind of influence her pronunciation has. It sounds more to me like she's all in on her english speaker's accent!
In any case, it is incredibly rare for a foreigner to pronounce Portuguese correctly. That includes foreign academics and teachers specialized in Portuguese as well as foreigners living in Brazil...
In any case, it is incredibly rare for a foreigner to pronounce Portuguese correctly. That includes foreign academics and teachers specialized in Portuguese as well as foreigners living in Brazil for many years. When a foreigner can pronounce Portuguese, even if just a few words, it either feels like they're Brazilian or some kind of impressive natural phenomenon :P
We seem to speak with a challenging collection of sounds.
Some thoughts from a portuguese for anyone interested: Needing a moment to "recalibrate to brazilian portuguese" is just wrong. I don't know anyone who said anything along these lines. The reverse...
Some thoughts from a portuguese for anyone interested:
Needing a moment to "recalibrate to brazilian portuguese" is just wrong. I don't know anyone who said anything along these lines. The reverse might be true though. Both online and in real life, I've heard brazilians saying that we speak too fast so they need to make an effort to understand us. I think it might be due to how much media we consume from brazil ("telenovelas", music, etc), and this will only get more intensified since kids consume a lot of youtube videos from brazilian channels.
The video implies that Portugal and Brazil make no efforts to campaign for the language, which I don't believe to be correct. "Instituto Guimarães Rosa" (Brazil) and "Instituto Camões" (Portugal) currently have a partnership to promote portuguese over the world. This partnership is new, but 15 years ago every portuguese speaking country made an orthographic agreement to standardize the spelling of several words, so I don't believe that these institutions were sitting on their asses doing nothing since then, or that they weren't doing anything before.
"Obrigado" sounds like "brigad"...? Maybe it's my bias speaking, but the first and last "o"s are heavily pronounced (especially the first), they should be "audible". I can't think of any accent that omits them, so I'm not sure where this comes from.
Too small and tired to do anything globally, ehhhhh....... I'm not sure what they mean here. In very recent history, we were in a dictatorship, and this dictatorship was betting hard on keeping our colonies, so much so that we went to war with them. When the revolution happened and the republic took over, the political will was to end the war and let the colonies go, it made no sense to keep the war going. But that didn't mean that we just retreated to our country and cut off all relationships with them, because we didn't... I'm not really sure if I have a point here because I'm not really sure what point they're making.
They think about Brazil, not about portuguese... Do people think of English when they think about USA or UK? Or Spanish when they think about Mexico or Spain? Genuine question. I just think that it's an odd point, because I'm thinking to myself as I'm writing this and language is not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of any country. But maybe that's just me.
"Portugal is essentially a Brazilian language that also happens to be spoken in Portugal and eight other countries" Congrats lady, you know how hurt my feelings
Can't prove it - nor do I care enough to try - but the video feels that it was scripted by an AI.
I find her comment that a Portuguese person listening to Brazilian needing a moment to recalibrate isn't quite right. I find it tends to be the other way around. People in Portugal are exposed to a lot of Brazilian media, especially from telenovelas and music. There are also a lot of Brazilians living in Portugal, especially the big cities. Not so much the other way around. Basically Brazil is to Portugal what the US is to England. Except maybe we're more open to adopting the other country's spelling conventions.
I would say it takes a moment for me to perform the mental switch to start understanding European Portuguese. But it's pretty fast.
Off topic, but I love they way the Portuguese speak. I once edited a documentary for a Portuguese sommelier and I spoke like them weeks.
Funny story about this sort of thing: when I was a kid I used to watch a lot of dodgy streams for soccer games online (I still do, but I used to, too). A lot of times the streams were in Russian or some other Eastern-European-sounding language that little ten-year-old Brazilian me couldn't understand.
One day I was watching one of these streams, not understanding anything the Russian commentators were saying. Until after like 10-15 minutes of watching, they said something that made my brain go "hey wait a second, I understood that... how could I understand it if it's in Russian?". Then that's when my brain clicked and I realized that it was Portuguese Portuguese. And from that moment on I could understand everything the commentators were saying. I seriously watched at least like ten minutes without having a clue that it was in my first language. It was like a switch had been flipped.
In my defense, I just assumed it was Russian like many other streams typically were (at least I think they were Russian, now I'm not so sure lol), and like 99.9% of the Portuguese I had heard at that point in my life was Brazilian Portuguese. So yeah, Portuguese Portuguese sounds very Eastern European to me.
I feel the spirit of Mitch Hedberg moving through this thread.
To throw in my two cents as someone who doesn't speak Portuguese but speaks just enough Spanish to get himself into trouble, every time I hear Brazilian Portuguese it sounds like an American speaking Spanish with a strong American accent. I don't know why that's just what my ear hears.
If it makes you feel any better, even Eastern Europeans can get confused. I've had Polish people and Russians come up to me and start speaking in their language after hearing me speak in Portuguese. Also I'm not on reddit anymore but r/PORTUGALCYKABLYAT is pretty funny
"Portugal is essentially a Brazilian language that also happens to be spoken in Portugal and eight other countries" I totally get it but oh boy don't let the Portuguese see that.
Also I wonder how much the similarities to Spanish take away from potential Portuguese learners. Both languages are very similar to the point where speaking one can get you by in a country that speaks the other, so if you're going to learn one, might as well learn the one that is spoken in more countries. If you ever find yourself in Brazil as a Spanish speaker you'd probably do just fine anyways, so why bother learning Portuguese unless you have some other reason to (like a family member you want to speak to or if you plan on living somewhere that speaks it).
Too late, I've already seen it!
I don't have an easy time understanding Spanish, especially if spoken by a native in a casual context. Spanish speakers speak very quickly and it's difficult to parse what they're saying. It's a bit like how accents give me trouble even in English, a language that, unlike Spanish, I have used extensively.
Brazilian portuguese on the other hand gives me no trouble at all as a baseline. The trouble from Brazilian speakers are those highly specific words at the slang level, such as but not limited to indigenous-originated words or loanwords we don't have in Portugal, which I just don't know the meaning of. Since it's a vocabulary problem, being forced to use Brazilian Portuguese translations in media is infuriating because I will not be able to understand them well, but in conversation it's easy to work around the problem.
P.S.: Foreigners who conflate linguistic and cultural similarity also make asses of themselves by coming here and asking for Tapas restaurants. We don't do Tapas. You're in the wrong country. Research for five minutes before booking your vacation!
A favorite quip of mine from the Big Bang Theory, when Koothrapali pointed out that over a billion Indians speak English, so actually, it's the Americans who have the accent.
Some comments in no particular order:
Of course Portugal can't grow its native speaker count through demographics. We have been a developed country for several decades, with the ageing/reduction in birth count that goes with it. Ideally we should be able to keep our population stable on our own, but it's in fact decreasing sharply (minus recent immigration) because we are so bad at managing ourselves we make life here nearly unsustainable for younger generations.
She's surprisingly bad at pronouncing all those country names!
Also, it felt like the video was written by someone who mostly understood the assignment (or by AI? They certainly used AI for the visuals), but she sometimes robbed it of sense by reading words incorrectly. Take the line about "obrigado": It is correct, but no, we don't pronounce it "brigade". That's how an english speaker would pronounce the written rendering of how a portuguese speaker would pronounce it...
During Estado Novo (the 20th century far right dictatorship) in Portugal, the party line was strongly pro-colonial, and portuguese people fought and died in overseas wars to hold on to our colonies. After the 1974 revolution the pendum swung toward a strong anti-colonial sentiment, which would have percluded any efforts to spread our language as a global language overseas as very distasteful. I feel like we only started getting over that trauma in the 90s. We did harmonize (by treaty) the way portuguese is written in literature with the other portuguese speaking countries. I can't judge if the changes were good or bad, but kids are taught the new version of the language, so it is what it is.
A better version of this video might mention the Dutch as a primary reason for the erosion of the portuguese empire before mentioning the Spanish, English or French. Not mentioning the Dutch (who, unlike the Spanish, competed directly against the Portuguese) just because their language doesn't have much of a global presence feels dishonest; in fact, I would rather like to hear an explanation of why things turned out different for them!
I got a little suspicious of this too. There was some odd AI-typical phrasing ("not just X, but also Y"). But I also noticed a couple places where there were grammatical errors and the speaker just blazed right through them without seeming to notice (6:57: "scattered across the map in a way that makes the total hard visualize as one thing"). Kinda odd.
Even dedicated English speakers cannot pronounce Portuguese. My guess is that it is difficult for them to overcome their knowledge of Spanish. Their brains naturally go to Spanish as a reference, and by doing so, they cannot achieve correct Portuguese pronunciation. Spanish is similar enough to work as a reference but different enough to lead them astray.
There is also the issue of the nasal sounds, which, with the exception of a few specific words, both English and Spanish lack.
Might be. I don't know enough spanish to be able to tell if that's the kind of influence her pronunciation has. It sounds more to me like she's all in on her english speaker's accent!
In any case, it is incredibly rare for a foreigner to pronounce Portuguese correctly. That includes foreign academics and teachers specialized in Portuguese as well as foreigners living in Brazil for many years. When a foreigner can pronounce Portuguese, even if just a few words, it either feels like they're Brazilian or some kind of impressive natural phenomenon :P
We seem to speak with a challenging collection of sounds.
Some thoughts from a portuguese for anyone interested:
Needing a moment to "recalibrate to brazilian portuguese" is just wrong. I don't know anyone who said anything along these lines. The reverse might be true though. Both online and in real life, I've heard brazilians saying that we speak too fast so they need to make an effort to understand us. I think it might be due to how much media we consume from brazil ("telenovelas", music, etc), and this will only get more intensified since kids consume a lot of youtube videos from brazilian channels.
The video implies that Portugal and Brazil make no efforts to campaign for the language, which I don't believe to be correct. "Instituto Guimarães Rosa" (Brazil) and "Instituto Camões" (Portugal) currently have a partnership to promote portuguese over the world. This partnership is new, but 15 years ago every portuguese speaking country made an orthographic agreement to standardize the spelling of several words, so I don't believe that these institutions were sitting on their asses doing nothing since then, or that they weren't doing anything before.
"Obrigado" sounds like "brigad"...? Maybe it's my bias speaking, but the first and last "o"s are heavily pronounced (especially the first), they should be "audible". I can't think of any accent that omits them, so I'm not sure where this comes from.
Too small and tired to do anything globally, ehhhhh....... I'm not sure what they mean here. In very recent history, we were in a dictatorship, and this dictatorship was betting hard on keeping our colonies, so much so that we went to war with them. When the revolution happened and the republic took over, the political will was to end the war and let the colonies go, it made no sense to keep the war going. But that didn't mean that we just retreated to our country and cut off all relationships with them, because we didn't... I'm not really sure if I have a point here because I'm not really sure what point they're making.
They think about Brazil, not about portuguese... Do people think of English when they think about USA or UK? Or Spanish when they think about Mexico or Spain? Genuine question. I just think that it's an odd point, because I'm thinking to myself as I'm writing this and language is not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of any country. But maybe that's just me.
"Portugal is essentially a Brazilian language that also happens to be spoken in Portugal and eight other countries" Congrats lady, you know how hurt my feelings
Can't prove it - nor do I care enough to try - but the video feels that it was scripted by an AI.