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.
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
Ha that's funny. I can definitely see how it sounds similar to Polish or Russian, but I don't speak either, so I never knew if it was just me or if Portuguese Portuguese actually sounded Eastern...
Ha that's funny. I can definitely see how it sounds similar to Polish or Russian, but I don't speak either, so I never knew if it was just me or if Portuguese Portuguese actually sounded Eastern European. Glad to hear it's not just me.
Sounds silly, but to me, Portuguese Portuguese sounds like someone trying to speak Portuguese without opening their mouths more than 5%.
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.
Glad someone caught the reference, ha. And I've never heard that interpretation before, but I'd wager it would vary a bit based on which dialect of Brazilian Portuguese. Some sound a lot more like...
Glad someone caught the reference, ha.
And I've never heard that interpretation before, but I'd wager it would vary a bit based on which dialect of Brazilian Portuguese. Some sound a lot more like Spanish than others.
There was one guy that sounded like an American doing a bad Russian accent while speaking Spanish. I’m not sure where he was from, though. Brazil is a massive country, as varied as any other that...
There was one guy that sounded like an American doing a bad Russian accent while speaking Spanish. I’m not sure where he was from, though. Brazil is a massive country, as varied as any other that size, maybe more so. It could also be down to the type of Spanish that I’m accustomed to hearing, which would be whatever is usually on Univision.
"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).
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.
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!
Interesting, maybe it's a Brazil vs Portugal thing. As a Brazilian, Spanish has always been 'close enough' where I can get by well enough just by using Portuguese with an accent, lol. Like I grew...
Interesting, maybe it's a Brazil vs Portugal thing. As a Brazilian, Spanish has always been 'close enough' where I can get by well enough just by using Portuguese with an accent, lol. Like I grew up in a very Spanish-speaking corner of the US and thus had many Spanish classes growing up as well as interactions with Spanish speakers from all over Latin America and usually just speaking a strange Portuguese-Spanish hybrid worked fine. I coasted through those classes just by speaking my Spanish-ized Portuguese and whenever I forgot a word I would just throw in the Portuguese version and 99% of the times it worked just fine. The other 1% where it didn't work is stuff like fork/knife/spoon (garfo/faca/colher vs tenedor/cuchillo/cuchara) and the days of the week (segunda/terca/quarta/quinta/sexta vs lunes/martes/miercoles/jueves/viernes) which always gave me a bit of trouble.
The speed thing is definitely a factor, though. As is the specific dialect of Spanish, like Cuban vs Mexican vs Argentinian vs Puerto Rican vs Spanish.
Honestly depending on the dialect, some Portuguese speakers from Portugal are probably harder for me to understand than some Spanish speakers.
And yeah the cultural thing must get annoying quick. Not quite as bad as your tapas example, but I can't tell you how many times I've been asked if I speak Brazilian, haha. (Plus who needs tapas when you have Pasteis de Nata amirite)
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!
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.
My husband is Portuguese (but doesn't speak it), and we visited the Azores a while back (where his father is from). At the time I had passable basic Spanish skills. I was able to use that...
My husband is Portuguese (but doesn't speak it), and we visited the Azores a while back (where his father is from).
At the time I had passable basic Spanish skills. I was able to use that knowledge and the similarities in the languages to recognize a lot of words on sight, but I was completely lost when it came to speaking and listening. Like you said, the reference point of Spanish is basically a non-starter for pronunciation.
Towards the end of the trip, I ordered some food and got praise from my father-in-law (who does speak Portuguese) for "sounding good" while doing it, so I was able to achieve a tiny bit of success.
I would venture that, even though Spanish can get you far in Brazil (if you speak slowly), to truly speak Portuguese one must make a deliberate effort to set it apart from Spanish. They really are...
I would venture that, even though Spanish can get you far in Brazil (if you speak slowly), to truly speak Portuguese one must make a deliberate effort to set it apart from Spanish. They really are two different languages and, at some point, it is best to treat them as such. Which is understandably very hard because you would have to let go of something very comfortable to you.
Towards the end of the trip, I ordered some food and got praise from my father-in-law (who does speak Portuguese) for "sounding good" while doing it, so I was able to achieve a tiny bit of success.
That is indeed high praise and I am very happy for you!
Grammatical errors like the portion you quote, ("scattered across the map in a way that makes the total hard visualize as one thing"), are honestly not super characteristic of modern generative...
grammatical errors and the speaker just blazed right through them without seeming to notice
Grammatical errors like the portion you quote, ("scattered across the map in a way that makes the total hard visualize as one thing"), are honestly not super characteristic of modern generative AI. That's more likely to be a typo by a human imo. I think it's also pretty common for someone reading a script to just go with its wording without correcting grammatical errors.
I will write for the umpteenth time that features like "not X, but Y" are extremely common in human English writing (and in the case of this particular feature, even speech) and don't serve as good evidence that writing is AI-generated even though AI does indeed overuse them. When AI writing is obviously distinguishable from human writing (which is less often than you think -- humans are pretty bad at distinguishing them in general nowadays), it's generally due to a much more holistic assessment in context rather than pointing at specific "tells", all of which are also things that appear in real human work. It's perfectly possible (and imo likely) that this video is indeed at least partially written by AI, but claiming that using common expressions like this is good evidence thereof results in people going on weird obsessive witch hunts about AI-generated content that does result in works of human authorship getting unnecessary hate.
That said, if you were asking me to bet one way or the other, I certainly wouldn't bet against this being at least partially AI-written.
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.
Agree with most of your points. Just wanted to mention as a Brazilian that obrigado definitely has strong O sounds, but when saying it quickly I've definitely dropped the first O a bunch. And as...
Agree with most of your points.
Just wanted to mention as a Brazilian that obrigado definitely has strong O sounds, but when saying it quickly I've definitely dropped the first O a bunch. And as the word tapers off, the last O sounds more like a U to the point where it just sounds like its part of the D and not actually it's own syllable. So I can see how non-Portuguese speakers might think it sounds like brigad instead.
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.
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
Ha that's funny. I can definitely see how it sounds similar to Polish or Russian, but I don't speak either, so I never knew if it was just me or if Portuguese Portuguese actually sounded Eastern European. Glad to hear it's not just me.
Sounds silly, but to me, Portuguese Portuguese sounds like someone trying to speak Portuguese without opening their mouths more than 5%.
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.
Glad someone caught the reference, ha.
And I've never heard that interpretation before, but I'd wager it would vary a bit based on which dialect of Brazilian Portuguese. Some sound a lot more like Spanish than others.
There was one guy that sounded like an American doing a bad Russian accent while speaking Spanish. I’m not sure where he was from, though. Brazil is a massive country, as varied as any other that size, maybe more so. It could also be down to the type of Spanish that I’m accustomed to hearing, which would be whatever is usually on Univision.
"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).
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.
Ha makes sense. I like how even in that example it's glossing over English English which has already been dwarfed by American English.
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!
Interesting, maybe it's a Brazil vs Portugal thing. As a Brazilian, Spanish has always been 'close enough' where I can get by well enough just by using Portuguese with an accent, lol. Like I grew up in a very Spanish-speaking corner of the US and thus had many Spanish classes growing up as well as interactions with Spanish speakers from all over Latin America and usually just speaking a strange Portuguese-Spanish hybrid worked fine. I coasted through those classes just by speaking my Spanish-ized Portuguese and whenever I forgot a word I would just throw in the Portuguese version and 99% of the times it worked just fine. The other 1% where it didn't work is stuff like fork/knife/spoon (garfo/faca/colher vs tenedor/cuchillo/cuchara) and the days of the week (segunda/terca/quarta/quinta/sexta vs lunes/martes/miercoles/jueves/viernes) which always gave me a bit of trouble.
The speed thing is definitely a factor, though. As is the specific dialect of Spanish, like Cuban vs Mexican vs Argentinian vs Puerto Rican vs Spanish.
Honestly depending on the dialect, some Portuguese speakers from Portugal are probably harder for me to understand than some Spanish speakers.
And yeah the cultural thing must get annoying quick. Not quite as bad as your tapas example, but I can't tell you how many times I've been asked if I speak Brazilian, haha. (Plus who needs tapas when you have Pasteis de Nata amirite)
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!
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.
My husband is Portuguese (but doesn't speak it), and we visited the Azores a while back (where his father is from).
At the time I had passable basic Spanish skills. I was able to use that knowledge and the similarities in the languages to recognize a lot of words on sight, but I was completely lost when it came to speaking and listening. Like you said, the reference point of Spanish is basically a non-starter for pronunciation.
Towards the end of the trip, I ordered some food and got praise from my father-in-law (who does speak Portuguese) for "sounding good" while doing it, so I was able to achieve a tiny bit of success.
I would venture that, even though Spanish can get you far in Brazil (if you speak slowly), to truly speak Portuguese one must make a deliberate effort to set it apart from Spanish. They really are two different languages and, at some point, it is best to treat them as such. Which is understandably very hard because you would have to let go of something very comfortable to you.
That is indeed high praise and I am very happy for you!
Grammatical errors like the portion you quote, ("scattered across the map in a way that makes the total hard visualize as one thing"), are honestly not super characteristic of modern generative AI. That's more likely to be a typo by a human imo. I think it's also pretty common for someone reading a script to just go with its wording without correcting grammatical errors.
I will write for the umpteenth time that features like "not X, but Y" are extremely common in human English writing (and in the case of this particular feature, even speech) and don't serve as good evidence that writing is AI-generated even though AI does indeed overuse them. When AI writing is obviously distinguishable from human writing (which is less often than you think -- humans are pretty bad at distinguishing them in general nowadays), it's generally due to a much more holistic assessment in context rather than pointing at specific "tells", all of which are also things that appear in real human work. It's perfectly possible (and imo likely) that this video is indeed at least partially written by AI, but claiming that using common expressions like this is good evidence thereof results in people going on weird obsessive witch hunts about AI-generated content that does result in works of human authorship getting unnecessary hate.
That said, if you were asking me to bet one way or the other, I certainly wouldn't bet against this being at least partially AI-written.
The modern generation's "This looks shopped. I can tell from some of the pixels and from seeing quite a few shops in my time."
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.
In my case, yes. I associate countries with their languages. Maybe not explicitly, but in a way where the language feels inseparable.
Agree with most of your points.
Just wanted to mention as a Brazilian that obrigado definitely has strong O sounds, but when saying it quickly I've definitely dropped the first O a bunch. And as the word tapers off, the last O sounds more like a U to the point where it just sounds like its part of the D and not actually it's own syllable. So I can see how non-Portuguese speakers might think it sounds like brigad instead.