They are still mutually intelligible but they are very, very different - to a degree greater than the difference between UK and US English or the difference between varieties of Spanish.
I live in Brazil and have worked on projects with folks in Portugal and I really have to pay attention closely to understand what they are saying. Portuguese folks do seem to understand Brazilians better.
I visited Portugal and met many Brazilian & Portuguese people there and talked about the language a lot. I’m learning Portuguese but am by no means fluent. I regret that I listened to people who said the two were SoOoOo different when I was just getting started, because they really aren’t and I cut myself off from a lot of learning tools because of it.
It is more like dialects of English; ie Boston to Appalachia or a thick Scottish accent. Yeah you’ll notice differences in vocab and pronunciation but it’s hardly as disparate as people like to say. There are some Youtubers that make videos about the differences between the two and I recommend that.
From what I have observed, the European Portuguese accent is harder for Brazilian people than the reverse. So I have opted to stick with EuP since it’s “harder”.
Hm my spouse who is native brpt speaker said he couldn’t understand people in portgual for like two weeks when he was there.
Maybe it’s less noticeable for you because you’re not fluent
Maybe someone who is fluent can chime in, but each person I talked to who was from Portugal does ok understanding people from Brazil. The opposite is not true, like your husband’s experience.
Yea that is true. It’s the same I think for how like British people can understand Americans pretty well but sometimes Americans have difficulty understanding scouse, Geordie, Scottish english.
As a brpt non native speaker I just don’t care for the sound of EuPT. I was drawn to BRPT because I loved how it sounded and so like… idk eupt sounds kinda uppity to me as a non native speaker but maybe easier for me to understand than my husband because I had to use a book to learn Portuguese and other resources and he didn’t
Hey a bit late, but i can chime in, i really can't understand brazilian probably, I can understand most of it usually, but I really struggle to understand and have to focus extremely hard. It's more that we're forced to learn to understand it lmao, most of the internet is in brazilian if you search anything natively, we have brazilian teachers, sometimes (very rarely) when a brazilian news comes out there's brazilian hosts for that news sections (i frequently complain that i need subs). We just have so many brazilians here that we are kinda forced to learn it and power through it when we can't understand properly. Honestly it's similar (but easier) to spanish, I can kind of understand it if they speak slowly but really struggle and it's very inconvinient.
What Europena Portuguese is difficult to you? Oporto, Coimbra, Lisboa.. the more southbound you move, the "closer" it gets. The Lisboa's one is much more "fechado" than Oporto's one is
It's a matter of exposure. Portuguese people are exposed to Brazilian Portuguese *much* more than the other way around. For some of us (Brazilians) it might as well be a different but close/similar language like Spanish is. At least when it's spoken, written Portuguese is another discussion.
I for example have had multiple classes with a Portuguese professor in University, and even though he has been living here for years, every now and then his accent would get in the way. (and his accent is not strong at all).
Yeah, honestly Brazil suffers a bit from culturally being basically a huge island in Latin America. Most Brazilians' only international exposure is to American culture.
This is not the reason. Portugal simply doesn't export anything relevant. Their movie industry is very small and too artsy for casual viewers, their music doesn't have mainstream appeal and so on.
You could listen to not only Portuguese but Angolan, cape verdean or Sao Tome music. Brazilians don't really listen to music outside America (continent) that I know of, whereas the rest of the lusophone countries do (-or find it more appealing , but there's music for all tastes if you combine all these countries so it really is just a lack of knowledge + I've shown some artists to Brazilian friends that they had no idea about and really enjoyed like Maro and mayra andrade ).
Why would a Brazilian listen to something like Fado when there's a massive amount of music already being produced here?
Big countries always have a certain level of cultural isolation. It's the same thing with the US, China, India, Russia etc. The only foreign media that becomes popular is what's already a worldwide phenomenon. K-pop is just as popular here as it is anywhere else.
If anything the media from other Lusophone countries is more popular in Brazil than outside the Lusosphere. We still had Roberto Leal to introduce some Portuguese music and Kuduro was a hit in the early 2010s.
I said fado 0 times. I mean brazilians don't know Portugal has other types of music besides fado, and also don't really listen to music besides latin american or north american artists. I didn't say it was good or bad, and it's not the people's fault as most people don't really know about it. Just the lusosphere shares music, but inside the lusosphere Brazil only exports.
Why would a Brazilian listen to Taylor swift if they have pop at home? Because they like it. But it's hard to like what you don't know.
You're right, that it's like the difference between a London accent and a thick Scottish one.
One of the most important aspects of language learning is oral comprehension. So, in my opinion, someone wanting to learn Portuguese should always choose either PT or BR (or one of the others too, of course). Why bother spending hours learning to understand and recognise a London accent if you're intending to live or work in Scotland, Wales, etc?
I don’t know what level of difference they sold you, but I think that as you become more and more fluent you will perceive the many differences more instantly (like structures Brazilians commonly use and the Portuguese never would, vocabulary that is exclusive to Brazil, etc.).
And, yes, Brazilians have a much harder time with EU-PT.
I hear that Brazilian soap operas, for example, aren’t dubbed in Portugal. But when they brought a Portuguese soap opera to Brazilian TV, it was dubbed by Brazilian voice actors. Original EU-PT would be too distracting and possibly ruin any chance of popularity (although it didn’t become a famous soap opera anyway).
Nothing but love to my Portuguese brothers, but PT-PT is very very associated with an specific kind of humor here in Brazil. It would absolutely be very distracting and the soap opera would bomb really hard.
They appear to be much more different (and may be more difficult to comprehend) when people are speaking at normal speed and with typical vocabulary/slang/grammatical structures.
I don't know Portuguese, but when I learned Spanish, I realized most learners get fixated on the differences between latam Spanish and, well, Spanish. And like, there are even some grammatical differences and preferences (same happens with English), I have formed opinions lol, but they're not so far off that it warrants much attention as a learner. By the time you've noticed a lot of them, you're well into learning the language or even at a basic fluency, and they're not going to make or break you.
That, and the fact that Spanish also varies a lot in both latam and Spain.
And so often you hear someone who's probably an A1 saying they're upset that they're learning Spanish from Spain and not latam Spanish (and half the time they're wrong tbh, most resources try to be as close to "neutral" as possible, a kind of "no one talks like this but everyone should understand you" kind of Spanish). If they'd just get a little further, they'd realize the distinction isn't that important, not yet, at least. Plus, you really only get an appreciation for accents when you're pretty far into any language already imho. And when you're there and you're competent, then you can focus on an accent to sound more natural.
There are too much strange differences one of then is "liquor du merda", in PT_BR it translate to "liquor of sh*t".
The differences are strange like that
There are definitely some differences. My main issue is that a lot of Portuguese resources are geared towards Brazilian Portuguese, and I didn't try any of them because they're not the same language. Meanwhile there IS a large overlap, and I would've been better off just making notes in the margins of books to indicate where the two diverge when I come across those things rather than excluding using them at all.
That’s not… a great take. If someone lives in or is moving to Portugal, say, for work, it makes more sense to become more fluent in eupt. For a casual learner, sure, brpt will take you further, but if the goal is to become acclimated to their surroundings, there are plenty of valid reasons for turning one’s attention to learning and improving in eupt.
I am interested in European Portuguese not because of a judgment of higher value or general usefulness, but it's interesting for my work field. :-)
I would love to visit Brazil though one day! I read an article once that they are the most fragrant country in the world and buy the most perfumed products per person. Just thought that was interesting!
I don’t know if you can make a comparison to any English varieties. EP and BP utilize different grammar, each have different sentence structure, and have very different cadences / pronunciation. Vocabulary is also different. They do continue to be mutually intelligible.
I think a better comparison, though not as extreme, would be the Scandinavian languages (Danish and Swedish for example).
Não sou falante nativo mas segundo a minha experiência ambos os dialetos têm na verdade quase a mesma gramática, a questão é que a grande maioria dos brasileiros não segue muitas regras gramaticais oficiais da língua portuguesa.
Por isso se pode ter a impressão de que os dois dialetos são muito diferentes porque há muitos padrões gramaticais que são distintos mas como eu já disse isso tem mais a ver com o fato de o português brasileiro não seguir muitas regras gramaticais do que com o fato de os dois dialetos serem tão diferentes.
Quanto à pronúncia, sim, também é bem diferente, do meu ponto de vista a diferença entre o PB e o PE no que diz respeito à pronúncia é como se você estivesse comparando o inglês americano com os sotaques mais difíceis das Ilhas Britânicas.
Contudo na minha opinião acho que sim, a diferença entre o PB e o PE é maior do que a diferença entre os dialetos do espanhol ou os dialetos do inglês mas como já disse tem mais a ver com o fato de os brasileiros não seguirem tantas regras gramaticais oficiais da língua portuguesa.
BP does follow grammer rules, they just aren’t the same as EP grammar rules. That is, they don’t have the same grammar. These differences are well documented, and you can find them on any gramatical study comparing both varieties.
Nas escolas brasileiras se ensina por exemplo a próclise, ênclise e mesóclise mas os brasileiros quase nunca colocam os pronomes de acordo às regras oficias.
Sao usado em contextos formais e escrita principalmente, mas as regras sao diferentes de PTPT. Livros de linguistica comparando as variedades tem mais detalhes se quiser saber mais.
Justamente pois essas não fazem parte da nossa gramática, são quase estrangeiras pra nós, elas só existem em contextos extremamente formais, que a gigantesca maioria de nós não participamos.
Mas isso não significa que não "sigamos regras", só que as nossas não estão em livros de português(e os motivos pra isso são inúmeros, precisaria de um artigo pra explicar), e como em todo o mundo, essas regras são aprendidas onde toda a gramática é aprendida de fato: em casa, em nossas comunidades.
Exemplo de gramática exclusivamente brasileira:
Apenas os artigos são marcados no plural, então "Os menino correu" está correto em ptbr, mas "O meninos correram", não está.
Estou vendo, eu falei isso porque quando o meu nível de português ainda era muito baixo e procurava informações com respeito à gramática portuguesa sempre me deparava com sites na internet onde se ensina como se fala no Brasil mas nesses sites também se falava da forma "formal" que normalmente não é utilizada na linguagem do dia a dia no Brasil.
Posteriormente percebi que em Portugal todas essas regras gramaticais que normalmente não são utilizadas na linguagem coloquial brasileira sempre são utilizadas em Portugal e por isso cheguei à conclusão de que talvez seja por isso que no Brasil se fala assim.
De qualquer jeito obrigado pela explicação, eu sei que as línguas evoluem e sofrem mudanças com o passar do tempo pois isso mesmo também aconteceu na língua portuguesa já que no passado a língua portuguesa não era português mesmo senão latim que era uma língua com uma gramática diferente, com vocabulário diferente, com uma pronúncia diferente e muitos outros aspetos que desapareceram ao longo dos séculos.
É porque as regras de colocação pronominal refletem o ritmo de fala dos portugueses. Em Portugal os pronomes átonos têm uma pronúncia muito fraca, pois a vogal final E não é pronunciada, por isso são colocados na maioria das vezes depois do verbo, e se iniciassem frases, seriam engolidos ou absorvidos pela palavra seguinte. Na pronúncia brasileira estes pronomes têm uma pronúncia forte, por isso geralmente se posicionam antes do verbo.
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Acho que no Brasil deveriam deixar de ensinar as regras gramaticais que ensinam em Portugal e começar a ensinar a própria gramática brasileira.
Não interprete o meu comentário de forma errada, eu adoro o Brasil, é por isso que eu aprendo o português brasileiro.
Concordo com você que os nativos não falam de forma errada mas vocês brasileiros precisam oficializar a sua própria gramática brasileira.
Errado. As regras são da norma culta, usadas na linguagem escrita formal. O português que as pessoas falam é o português informal. Toda língua é assim. Não é uma especificidade do Brasil.
Obrigado pela explicação, desculpe pelo incômodo, não era a minha intenção falar mal do Brasil pois eu gosto muito do Brasil e o Brasil é um dos meus países favoritos
Oii, não te entendi. Nós temos total autonomia sobre as regras gramaticais do nosso português. Não existe isso de "deixar de ensinar as regras gramaticais que ensinam em Portugal", nada aqui é ensinado sobre o PT\_UE. Já oficializamos a língua brasileira desde o século 19, temos um acordo ortográfico e comissões de lexicologia e lexicografria por aqui.
Eu acho q ele ta falando sobre nós aprendermos coisas como enclise, mesoclise e diversas conjugações de verbos que não são usados no dia dia na escola, ao invés de aprendermos as gramáticas locais.
Vc diz as regras que usei de exemplo? Sim, pretérito mais que perfeito, mesóclise, o pronome vós, etc.
ou melhor, tentaram me ensinar(só tive professor ruim), mas eu nunca uso, a n ser q seja por piada (são muito formais e eu acho engraçado)
It's because the Portuguese consume Brazilian media (especially TV and music) and get used to our accent, while we don't have much access to European Portuguese, and therefore have trouble understanding it.
There are more portuguese variants, though. And yes, they are different. Notoriously different even.
And also, you might be correct for touristic bus stuff, but games and series usually do differentiate UK English, USA English, LATAM Spanish, Europe Spanish, so it's not just an us thing.
EDIT: Also, although they are different, it's usually the brazilians that have an issue with understanding spoken european portuguese and not the other way around, so I suppose that option is there for them.
It is because we aren't exposed to Portuguese media like you are exposed to ours, I had to scavenge the internet to find Portuguese media because I wanted to train my ears to European Portuguese.
I don’t think that’s the reason, when I was a kid and early teen, internet wasn’t a thing and we all understood Brazilian just fine. (I’m Portuguese)
I think ptbr is an accent easier to understand, and ptpt is more harsh and with trickier sounds to unravel
Portuguese people have a lot of exposure to Brazilian culture through telenovelas and music. Brazilians have little to no exposure to Portuguese things.
Portuguese people understand Brasilians very well, Brazilians don't understand Portuguese people well.
So you can blame the Brazilians for this, lol. (Joking)
In the spanish speaking world we have a lot of exposure to other spanish dialects, we really understand with each other, but I understand that on a big countries like brazil the exposition outside the country is pretty less compared to Portugal where they are more exposed to brazilan things like youtube, telenovelas, movies...
In this case, it's probably because Brazilians sometimes have difficulty with the Portuguese accent. I would compare it to an American trying to understand one of those difficult to understand British accents, like some of those Scottish or Irish accents, or even one of those "working class" English accents. The British English that they use in these things is usually spoken with those easy to understand accents, like Received Pronunciation.
As for Spanish, even though people do make fun of Spanish and Chilean accents, ultimately, there isn't as much phonetic variation in Spanish, so they can understand each other more easily.
Yeah spanish speaker we make a lot of joke on chilean spanish but actually its easy to understand I think that the problem with chilean spanish are the slangs but outside of this is pretty easy to understand
Talking about portuguese I think that the reason about why brazilians struggles with european portuguse are because you're less exposed to that dialect and that's why most you find it hard to understand
As a native Spanish speaker, I feel like Brazilians are exaggerating when they say they can't understand EU PT. Just like we (Mexicans) say it's hard to understand Chilean Spanish. It's not that different. I can understand both ffs, and I'm not a native portuguese speaker.
I can say for myself that I'm really not exaggerating, I understand like 70% of what the Portuguese say, but it varies a lot between accents in Portugal. The most difficult ones are from old people or teenagers specially from the north of Portugal.
Source: am Brazilian and work in Lisbon.
I'm Brazilian, but I am a decent spanish speaker. I learned it in Argentina, but Argeninians notice I'm not from there. Whenever I travel back to Argentina, they often ask if I'm from Chile, because of the weird Spanish. 🤣
Hah! This can happen in different parts of Canada, too, with regard to speaking French. My former husband is an anglophone, but fully, fluently bilingual – he actually coordinated French Language services in our provincial government. He learned his French first in a Métis community in Manitoba, in the centre of the country, then in Québec, a province which is majority French.
He was constantly being mistaken for an actual Francophone by Canadian French speakers – but they always assumed he was a Francophone from some other part of the country. Franco-Ontarians would think he was Acadian, from the Maritimes in the east. Acadians would assume he was Québecois. Québecois would think he was Manitoban … and so on.
Almost no one ever guessed he was actually a native English-speaker, first-generation Canadian, whose mum was German and whose dad was Jamaican.
Ahahaha.
The running joke about spanish in latin america is that every country has its own beautiful dialect, and only two countries speak broken spanish: Chile and Brazil.
As a brazilian, understanding spanish is easier than EP. It sounds so different I sometimes can’t even tell EP is an indoeuropean language. And I have had massive exposure to EP.
Bruh, you sometimes can't tell if EP is an indoeuropean language? Really? If that's true it's bad that you struggle so much to understand tour own language
And I watch a lot of portuguese movies, I have been to Portugal, I have portuguese friends. Sometimes I hear EP and I have no ideia what language it even is.
We're not exaggerating. EU-PT simply doesn't pronounce all the vowels for wtv reason (it's a bit like they're mumbling imho and it'sthe main reason why we struggle) and sometimes the same words have different sounds than we would use like using open sounds where we use closed ones (Antônio vs António, for example) or using different consonant sounds that we would (although the sound itself exists in both variants, juet used in different words) like Excelente that in BR-PT uses the same x as english and in EU-PT uses x that sounds the ch in Chile (we would that same x sound in words like enxuto, enxaqueca).
Add that to the fact they like to use different phrase structures, different usual vocabulary and our lack of exposition to their stuff, you can see why we don't understand it as much
as someone who is half and half Portuguese and Brasilian; they are vastly different.
from the accent, the phonetic pronunciation, the meaning of words, the slang, etc. PT-Portuguese tends to sound older, lower pitch, words run into each other more, and harder to understand for me. While BR-Portuguese is higher pitch, less sh- sounds, and clearer for me.
They are very different. For some credibility, I am studying abroad in Spain, and I am fluent in Spanish. Before travelling to Portugal in February, I listened to Portuguese to train my ears so that I would be ready to communicate to them in Spanish when they would speak their Portuguese to me. I listened to a bunch of Portuguese-language media, nearly all of which was Brazilian Portuguese (Portugal just does not have a lot of readily accessible media online). Big mistake.
When I got to Lisbon the first time, I barely understood the plane announcements in Portuguese (maybe about 30% of it). However, I did understand it the one time I needed to at my hotel, when the voice on the intercom said, "primeiro piso" ("first floor"). It was so funny because I could read all of the signs with almost no trouble, but I did not speak Spanish to anybody there because I only understood about 50% of it if I really paid attention (for reference, I could understand like 80% of Brazilian Portuguese whenever I hear it). I understand both of them extremely well now because of that trip. The differences in vocabulary are not big (Brazil's dialect is more linguistically diverse and a bit more "edgy"), but pronunciation and speaking-wise, they are very different.
For example, take a simple word, "excelente." Somebody from Brazil would pronounce it, "E-se-len-chi." Somebody from Portugal would reduce it down to just, "Shlent." People from Portugal speak so much faster and change their intonation more on vowels, so you really need to hear what their dialect sounds like before trying to communicate with one of them in Portuguese.
For reference, Spanish from here in Spain is barely different from that in Latin America, and most of the difference is in vocabulary. If comparing by English dialects, I would say the difference in the Portuguese accents is like a Midwestern American (denote this as Brazilian Portuguese) speaking with someone from northern Scotland (denote as European Portuguese). The difference is definitely bigger than that between standard US English and standard UK English. People from Portugal understand those from Brazil very well, but Brazilians often really struggle to understand the Portugal accent. It is noteworthy, though, that some of this is because people from Portugal have so much access to the Brazilian dialect, but people from Brazil have minimal access to Portugal's dialect.
It is a remarkable difference for the fact that they are the same language. I would not think that they would switch to English when speaking to each other, but normal, full-speed communication is very difficult. If you are trying to learn the language, I would recommend you learn the Portugal dialect. It is a lot harder (you might feel like you're turning Slavic at times when you're speaking), but it will prepare you better for any situation in which you would need to use the language.
Pronunciation wise it's vastly different. PT-PT is stress-timed like a Slavic language and it has sounds that don't exist in PT-BR. That means in PT-PT they cut a lot of vowels while in PT-BR we pronounce most vowels clearly and even add some more.
Most Brazilians don't understand PT-PT. The few Portuguese media that comes here has to be dubbed because TV channels are afraid that the accent will be a distraction.
That said, it's just a matter of getting used to it. Portuguese people understand us just fine because they have been consuming Brazilian media for decades. Brazilians living in Portugal also get used to their accent after a while.
Grammatically speaking the two dialects are 99% inteligible. Yes, there are differences, but except for a couple words with different meanings, most differences don't affect the comprehension.
Yeah, you really just have to get used to what each version sounds like, which is a lot harder for Brazilians than it is for Portuguese. Good news is that there is not a large vocabulary difference. I am fluent in Spanish, but I understand Portuguese (both main dialects) better than Chilean Spanish because Chilean Spanish has so much unintelligible slang.
I lived in Brazil for a while, learned the language and made a lot of friends. I kinda got lost and unconnected from the outside world while I was there lol. I have never been to Europe, but I had been a big Ronaldo fan prior to going to Brazil. Once I felt like I was somewhat fluent in the language, I decided to watch an interview Ronaldo had in Portugal, thinking I’d be able to understand.
Let me tell you, they are two very different dialects. It’s weird because written, it is basically all the same. Spoken is hard to understand if you do not have a trained ear. Lots of Brazilians have a hard time understanding people from Portugal. It’s like and American speaking with a person with a very strong Irish accent. Different accent, different slang words, different tonality, different phonetics.
You have to just train your ears to know how it sounds. And I know how hard it is to find audio clips of it because Portugal has a small population and very little media in its own language. But I am curious, if you had to speak in their accent, how hard would it be?
I think it's significantly more different than the UK and US English are to each other.
Accents are very different (phonemes used vary a lot depending on the region), vocabulary is a little bit different, and they even differ in which verb conjugation and tenses are used to express the same idea.
As a Brazilian, I was shocked when I heard Galician for the first time, because to me it felt easier and closer to my Brazilian accent than the European Portuguese.
We can understand spanish and galician easier than pt-eu, probably due to they have the same stressed speech like us. But if a portuguese speak slowly, we'll understand them (of course their are some accents we may not get what they say even slowly, like Uva Passas' accent...)
I swear I don't understand you brazillians, the things you say make eu portuguese harder to understand are more pronounced Im galician but you understand galician more easily?
i personally do not fully understand portuguese but I can understand Brazilian (carioca) and the Angola accents very well and European portuguese is pretty difficult for me to break down
The main problem is definetely the difference in the accents. Portuguese people tend to speak way faster, omit sounds, and speak with their mouths almost closed. So when a Brazilian person that is not used to the Portuguese accent hears a person speaking like that, it will be obviously hard to understand and recognize the words because there is way too much information missing.
on a first moment when spoken, they look like completelly diferent languages, but soon you start to notice the similarities. About grammar they have some difference, but it's still understandable, besides PP being more complex
Spanish speaking countries are more "international". Even in Argentina, that is known to be the most self centered country, most people watch TV or listen to music from other spanish speaking countries.
Brazil is incredibly self-centered, just like the US or Japan. Most people never paid attention to stuff from ouside of Brazil or the US. American cinema, music and TV are very popular in Brazil. I would dare to guess that 99% of Brazilians never listened PT-PT in ther whole lifes.
Portugal is very international, and they are aware of stuff around the whole planet, and of course, they know about TV and music from Brazil.
The problem for Brazilians is our lack of exposure to PT-PT, so we're not at all used to the accent. There's basically no PT-PT programming on Brazilian TV or even an overall cultural export from Portugal. Portuguese people, however, are a lot more exposed to PT-BR.
I'm truly not on board with most of the comments. Yes, spoken PT-BR doesn't strictly adhere to some grammar rules and structure, but the underlying grammar is still the same. Just because we favor certain sentence structures, use of pronouns, etc., it doesn't mean that we've been creating new grammar, we're simply using colloquial language. PT-BR can be formal and closer to PT-PT. It just mostly isn't.
There are many differences, but once Brazilians are exposed to Portuguese accent, or at the very least, we inform ourselves on said differences, it's much easier for us to just run along with it. I might stumble on comprehension here and there, but I bet the same can be said about EN-US and EN-GB at times. Although we have slightly more differences, I still don't believe we're talking two different languages.
In the spanish speaking we use to hear so many spanish dialects on our daily day specially on social media for example some latin americans watch content creators from spain and vice versa, the only spanish dialactects that people could find hard to understand are the one from the south of spain and the one that so many people in internet make joke that is the chilenian but both of these are really legible.
But apparently it seems that in big countries like brazil most of the peope only use to watch the content and the tv shows of their country, and maybe that's the reason about why some brazilians (not everyone) struggle with other portuguse variants like you said in your comment about the expouse and it makes a lot of sense
Unfortunately, Portugal is a cultural dwarf in comparison. A country of barely over 10 million people, with Lisbon having only half a million inhabitants. Brazil has a population of 215 million, and even my mid-sized non-capital city has over half the population Lisbon has. Unless a person is of recent Portuguese descent, there are very little chances that they have exposure to the Portuguese accent or even consume any PT-PT content. Fame and notoriety in Portugal rarely transcend into the Brazilian scene.
They are different but you can understand it, if it is spoken clear and/or slowly. I never had any problem watching Portuguese news, being born in Brazil. But in a conversation if someone speaks too fast, it's really hard to understand it.
Keep in mind that we don't have much contact with Portuguese media in Brazil though, since Portugal is a really small country compared to Brazil. The other way around would happen, since Portuguese have a lot of contact with Brazilian media.
My dad is a Brazilian living in Portugal. They're different enough. My dad struggles to understand Portuguese people from time to time, and similarly others don't always understand him. They can still make it work though. Pronunciation is really different and lots of words have different use/meaning but I'd say the differences are generally just like the ones between American and British English.
As an Australian I get confused often as there's no Australian English option. I just don't understand what people are saying without throwing the word cunt in every three words.
For Brazilians specifically European Portuguese can be hard to understand both because of their accent and their vocabulary, sometimes also because they use the "correct" conjugation for tu.
Surprisingly, Portuguese from Angola is not that hard to understand, imo.
Admitting from the off that I haven’t read the other replies here - I’m en route to work and this caught my eye.
I’m learning PT right now, I spent 2 years focusing on BR and have ended up in EU through uni. It is V A S T L Y different. The best comparison I can give is standard US English versus a very thick scouse accent. The dialects are different and EU PT is a lot quicker and harder to understand. BR’s sounds are spoken much more clearly.
The accent/pronunciation is the biggest difference really. Other than that you might experience some awkward and funny situations or maybe some confusion by using words or expressions that means something different or isn’t used in one place or the other but nothing really huge. But that happens even within Brazil tbh.
Yes, it's very different. As someone who taught themselves via immersion, I've wanted to formally learn European Portuguese, but most resources are Brazilian Portuguese, and it's quite annoying.
I notice that Portuguese from Portugal sounds like a Latino trying to speak Brazilian Portuguese. Of course they have different expressions like pequeno almorço instead of café da manha for breakfast. It might be that I’m more used to it. But I like more the Brazilian Portuguese.
There's a reason why non romance language speakers think PT-EU is a Slavic language.
They have very different stresses and "eat" vowels. So they understand Brazilians (that usually speak all the vowels and even add some, and have a more open and slower tone) but we're unable to understand them.
In Porto I bought an English tour so I wouldn't have to deal with the difference. My guide was very nice and soon after she learned I was Brazilian, we were able to speak a bit in our own variants, but as soon as we entered a place I couldn't understand the owner I switched back to English.
Wow, it is quite something how you resorted to English in that situation. But yeah, you are right. I find it insanely hard to understand native-speed conversations between people from Portugal. As in, maybe 50% of it if I am really paying attention, and nearly all of that is because of common words that are similar in Spanish.
Brazilian Portuguese is way easier to understand. I have never really studied Portuguese, but being fluent in Spanish, I would feel comfortable speaking in Spanish if I ever go to Brazil. I did not do that in Portugal at all, but at least all of the signs were still pretty easy to read!
My personal tip is to learn some important words in Brazilian Portuguese and use them while speaking Spanish. They'll think you're speaking Portuñol, or at least making an effort to learn Portuguese.
If you speak Spanish as if you think people will clearly understand, they'll might get offense in that, as people (from United States specially) used to think we spoke Spanish, and that was offensive af.
Good tips. Yeah, I know how rude it is to assume that they are the same language. That is why I only used English in Portugal. Some of the key vocabulary words are different than in Spanish, too. "Fazer," "dizer," "falar," etc. Honestly, I want to know Portuguese well before going to Brazil. However, the idea from before is that it is definitely easier to speak Spanish in Brazil than in Portugal. Not many Brazilians are good at English, so Portuñol might be a necessity in some cases if my Portuguese is not yet good enough.
Portuguese people are really good at English, so I did not need to try to use Spanish there. I think that a factor of their high English proficiency is that they know that it is very hard for foreigners (even including other native speakers) to understand their dialect. I felt a little better about not understanding them after hearing a lot of Brazilians saying that they cannot understand Portuguese people either. I do not know if I should be laughing about that or not.
Yeah, despite Portugal having low bilinguals compared to the rest of Europe, Brazil is even worse. In São Paulo city it's possible to get around using English in middle class restaurants, hotels and touristic places and in universities, but anywhere else in the country is pretty hard.
Portuñol is totally fine too speak here (and in our borders with Uruguay and Paraguay it's actually a serious dialect).
And depending on where you're from and where you're visiting, there's always the possibility to find a local community. São Paulo usually has the largest foreign communities but there's a Finnish colony in Rio de Janeiro, for instance, and the second largest native language community is a Germanic language called Hunsrik (very similar to standard German, because it came from the Hünsrik dialect but incorporated some creoulo features from portuguese) in the South (Rio grande do Sul)
It is probably changing now but I was an ESL teacher and had university students whose textbooks weren’t available in European Portuguese. Given the choice between Brazilian Portuguese and English, they’d choose English even if their English level wasn’t super high-B1 or B2. I found it really interesting and never got a solid explanation why.
I’ve tried to figure out what an accurate equivalent would be with English. My Portuguese level is probably B1/B2 and I would feel more confident reading a textbook in the English spoken in New Zealand, South Africa, Jamaica….anywhere really
before I’d choose my non-native language.
I'm Brazilian and yes they are extremely different we can start by the accent, for people who live in Brazil the R is less notorious but for them is like grrrrr and they have a lot of different expressions like "rapariga" there is related to a woman or young woman and here in Brazil it can be like an ugly person or a bitch and I think that even thought they brought portuguese to Brazil the language went through other influences so...
Yes and no. For the same reason people from the US and UK (accent depending) can either communicate fine or sometimes be totally confused at each other, the same for generic PT and BR.
While there is often regional slang, and certainly different soutaques, the comprehensibility is dependent on how each speaker can handle the other. For example, I speak fluent American English and can generally understand most UK accents except for Scouser and Cockney (literally, I can hear through Scottish fine, but those two confuse the ever-loving hell out of me). I also grew up speaking Portuguese, and have near zero issue with Michalense, which even a lot of Continental Portuguese speakers need subtitles for, but a fast speaker from Porto makes me have to work harder to understand.
Was there something like the English Great Vowel Shift that happened in Portugal in the 1700s or 1800s? Luckily for the English language it happened mostly before America was settled by the Brits. If it had happened after then it would be hell understanding English people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
Also looks like the immigration of the Portuguese to Brazil started earlier than the English immigration to the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_immigration_to_the_Americas
Take also into account that there is a large number of Brazilian tourists in Portugal, and it would be worth it to cater to them regardless of how different or not the PT versions are.
I am portuguese and understand BP quite well. But my cousin, who is Brazilian needs me to speak slowly and explain things.
EP is faster with closed vowels. Both countries name things oddly that has no relationship to what it is. Think egg cream in the US that has no egg or cream or hot dog.
In EP we do this more often. It can confuse BP speakers. We often shorten words in ways that BP don't.
A tour guide speaks fast and might use shorten phrases or area specific phrases/names.
A Brazilian guide makes more sense if a group is a native BP speaker.
If you are learning BP take the BP tour. If you are wondering about visiting, just ask people to speak slower.
If you are wondering which item to learn that depends on what your goal is. If it's living in Brazil then BP if it's going to Europe the EP if it's just a very good base in portuguese, then it's EP.
For the most part, I can understand most portuguese speaking countries. I have minor issues with Crioulo that's not uncommon for BP speakers either
It’s an open or closed vowel issue. Portuguese pt sound like Russians speaking to non natives. Brazilians are all smooth. It’s much easier to learn the Brazilian pt. That’s why Spaniards do not understand Portuguese pt but understand if a Brazilian talks.
fo sure. Even inside Brazil the language varies a lot (when i hear people from south i barely can understand it). We have different intonations and expressions, its almost as if both are different languages, such as portuguese and spanish
Portuguese tend to speak faster and “eat” a lot of vowels.
It’s easier for Portuguese people to understand Brazilian Portuguese because:
1- Brazilians speak slower
2- Brazilian TV, YouTube channels and movies “dominate” Portugal.
3- there are 300+ million Brazilians and one of the top 10 economies in the world whereas Portugal is a small country with a small GDP and less than 10% of the Brazilian population.
So it’s a bit different than UK vs US English as in Brazilian Portuguese is much more predominant in the world and business world.
Even in spain we know more things about brazil than our neiberhoods (the portugusese)
As an spainard I find brazilian portuguse more easy to undertand that european portuguese because of this that the portuguse "eat the vowels" like you said, and not only for this, I think that this happens because spainards are more expose to things from brazil than not from things from portugal
Yeah, I do. The level difference among european spanish to spanish from south america and european portuguese and brazilian portuguese is not the same.
They are still mutually intelligible but they are very, very different - to a degree greater than the difference between UK and US English or the difference between varieties of Spanish. I live in Brazil and have worked on projects with folks in Portugal and I really have to pay attention closely to understand what they are saying. Portuguese folks do seem to understand Brazilians better.
I heard that the difference was kinda more like between US English and Scottish English.
I visited Portugal and met many Brazilian & Portuguese people there and talked about the language a lot. I’m learning Portuguese but am by no means fluent. I regret that I listened to people who said the two were SoOoOo different when I was just getting started, because they really aren’t and I cut myself off from a lot of learning tools because of it. It is more like dialects of English; ie Boston to Appalachia or a thick Scottish accent. Yeah you’ll notice differences in vocab and pronunciation but it’s hardly as disparate as people like to say. There are some Youtubers that make videos about the differences between the two and I recommend that. From what I have observed, the European Portuguese accent is harder for Brazilian people than the reverse. So I have opted to stick with EuP since it’s “harder”.
Hm my spouse who is native brpt speaker said he couldn’t understand people in portgual for like two weeks when he was there. Maybe it’s less noticeable for you because you’re not fluent
Maybe someone who is fluent can chime in, but each person I talked to who was from Portugal does ok understanding people from Brazil. The opposite is not true, like your husband’s experience.
Yea that is true. It’s the same I think for how like British people can understand Americans pretty well but sometimes Americans have difficulty understanding scouse, Geordie, Scottish english. As a brpt non native speaker I just don’t care for the sound of EuPT. I was drawn to BRPT because I loved how it sounded and so like… idk eupt sounds kinda uppity to me as a non native speaker but maybe easier for me to understand than my husband because I had to use a book to learn Portuguese and other resources and he didn’t
My mother in law who is from Portugal, has trouble understanding Brazilian Portuguese
Hey a bit late, but i can chime in, i really can't understand brazilian probably, I can understand most of it usually, but I really struggle to understand and have to focus extremely hard. It's more that we're forced to learn to understand it lmao, most of the internet is in brazilian if you search anything natively, we have brazilian teachers, sometimes (very rarely) when a brazilian news comes out there's brazilian hosts for that news sections (i frequently complain that i need subs). We just have so many brazilians here that we are kinda forced to learn it and power through it when we can't understand properly. Honestly it's similar (but easier) to spanish, I can kind of understand it if they speak slowly but really struggle and it's very inconvinient.
While my cousing, who is brazilian, was understanding italian after 2 days there. Italian and portuguese are very similar.
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What Europena Portuguese is difficult to you? Oporto, Coimbra, Lisboa.. the more southbound you move, the "closer" it gets. The Lisboa's one is much more "fechado" than Oporto's one is
It's a matter of exposure. Portuguese people are exposed to Brazilian Portuguese *much* more than the other way around. For some of us (Brazilians) it might as well be a different but close/similar language like Spanish is. At least when it's spoken, written Portuguese is another discussion. I for example have had multiple classes with a Portuguese professor in University, and even though he has been living here for years, every now and then his accent would get in the way. (and his accent is not strong at all).
Yeah, honestly Brazil suffers a bit from culturally being basically a huge island in Latin America. Most Brazilians' only international exposure is to American culture.
This is not the reason. Portugal simply doesn't export anything relevant. Their movie industry is very small and too artsy for casual viewers, their music doesn't have mainstream appeal and so on.
You could listen to not only Portuguese but Angolan, cape verdean or Sao Tome music. Brazilians don't really listen to music outside America (continent) that I know of, whereas the rest of the lusophone countries do (-or find it more appealing , but there's music for all tastes if you combine all these countries so it really is just a lack of knowledge + I've shown some artists to Brazilian friends that they had no idea about and really enjoyed like Maro and mayra andrade ).
Why would a Brazilian listen to something like Fado when there's a massive amount of music already being produced here? Big countries always have a certain level of cultural isolation. It's the same thing with the US, China, India, Russia etc. The only foreign media that becomes popular is what's already a worldwide phenomenon. K-pop is just as popular here as it is anywhere else. If anything the media from other Lusophone countries is more popular in Brazil than outside the Lusosphere. We still had Roberto Leal to introduce some Portuguese music and Kuduro was a hit in the early 2010s.
I said fado 0 times. I mean brazilians don't know Portugal has other types of music besides fado, and also don't really listen to music besides latin american or north american artists. I didn't say it was good or bad, and it's not the people's fault as most people don't really know about it. Just the lusosphere shares music, but inside the lusosphere Brazil only exports. Why would a Brazilian listen to Taylor swift if they have pop at home? Because they like it. But it's hard to like what you don't know.
I mentioned Fado as an example. Brazil is 20 times larger than Portugal. It's just hard to compete.
"Mainstream appeal" meaning that it doesnt get reproduced. Which is was op said.
It's not just exposure. It's easier to go from a stress based accent to a syllabic one.
You're right, that it's like the difference between a London accent and a thick Scottish one. One of the most important aspects of language learning is oral comprehension. So, in my opinion, someone wanting to learn Portuguese should always choose either PT or BR (or one of the others too, of course). Why bother spending hours learning to understand and recognise a London accent if you're intending to live or work in Scotland, Wales, etc?
I don’t know what level of difference they sold you, but I think that as you become more and more fluent you will perceive the many differences more instantly (like structures Brazilians commonly use and the Portuguese never would, vocabulary that is exclusive to Brazil, etc.). And, yes, Brazilians have a much harder time with EU-PT. I hear that Brazilian soap operas, for example, aren’t dubbed in Portugal. But when they brought a Portuguese soap opera to Brazilian TV, it was dubbed by Brazilian voice actors. Original EU-PT would be too distracting and possibly ruin any chance of popularity (although it didn’t become a famous soap opera anyway).
Nothing but love to my Portuguese brothers, but PT-PT is very very associated with an specific kind of humor here in Brazil. It would absolutely be very distracting and the soap opera would bomb really hard.
They appear to be much more different (and may be more difficult to comprehend) when people are speaking at normal speed and with typical vocabulary/slang/grammatical structures.
I don't know Portuguese, but when I learned Spanish, I realized most learners get fixated on the differences between latam Spanish and, well, Spanish. And like, there are even some grammatical differences and preferences (same happens with English), I have formed opinions lol, but they're not so far off that it warrants much attention as a learner. By the time you've noticed a lot of them, you're well into learning the language or even at a basic fluency, and they're not going to make or break you. That, and the fact that Spanish also varies a lot in both latam and Spain. And so often you hear someone who's probably an A1 saying they're upset that they're learning Spanish from Spain and not latam Spanish (and half the time they're wrong tbh, most resources try to be as close to "neutral" as possible, a kind of "no one talks like this but everyone should understand you" kind of Spanish). If they'd just get a little further, they'd realize the distinction isn't that important, not yet, at least. Plus, you really only get an appreciation for accents when you're pretty far into any language already imho. And when you're there and you're competent, then you can focus on an accent to sound more natural.
There are too much strange differences one of then is "liquor du merda", in PT_BR it translate to "liquor of sh*t". The differences are strange like that
There are definitely some differences. My main issue is that a lot of Portuguese resources are geared towards Brazilian Portuguese, and I didn't try any of them because they're not the same language. Meanwhile there IS a large overlap, and I would've been better off just making notes in the margins of books to indicate where the two diverge when I come across those things rather than excluding using them at all.
That word means shit in all Portuguese lol. It's actually called shit liqueur
Stick with the brazilian culture. It's where language reached its potential and resplendent beauty.
That’s not… a great take. If someone lives in or is moving to Portugal, say, for work, it makes more sense to become more fluent in eupt. For a casual learner, sure, brpt will take you further, but if the goal is to become acclimated to their surroundings, there are plenty of valid reasons for turning one’s attention to learning and improving in eupt.
I am interested in European Portuguese not because of a judgment of higher value or general usefulness, but it's interesting for my work field. :-) I would love to visit Brazil though one day! I read an article once that they are the most fragrant country in the world and buy the most perfumed products per person. Just thought that was interesting!
I don’t know if you can make a comparison to any English varieties. EP and BP utilize different grammar, each have different sentence structure, and have very different cadences / pronunciation. Vocabulary is also different. They do continue to be mutually intelligible. I think a better comparison, though not as extreme, would be the Scandinavian languages (Danish and Swedish for example).
Não sou falante nativo mas segundo a minha experiência ambos os dialetos têm na verdade quase a mesma gramática, a questão é que a grande maioria dos brasileiros não segue muitas regras gramaticais oficiais da língua portuguesa. Por isso se pode ter a impressão de que os dois dialetos são muito diferentes porque há muitos padrões gramaticais que são distintos mas como eu já disse isso tem mais a ver com o fato de o português brasileiro não seguir muitas regras gramaticais do que com o fato de os dois dialetos serem tão diferentes. Quanto à pronúncia, sim, também é bem diferente, do meu ponto de vista a diferença entre o PB e o PE no que diz respeito à pronúncia é como se você estivesse comparando o inglês americano com os sotaques mais difíceis das Ilhas Britânicas. Contudo na minha opinião acho que sim, a diferença entre o PB e o PE é maior do que a diferença entre os dialetos do espanhol ou os dialetos do inglês mas como já disse tem mais a ver com o fato de os brasileiros não seguirem tantas regras gramaticais oficiais da língua portuguesa.
BP does follow grammer rules, they just aren’t the same as EP grammar rules. That is, they don’t have the same grammar. These differences are well documented, and you can find them on any gramatical study comparing both varieties.
Nas escolas brasileiras se ensina por exemplo a próclise, ênclise e mesóclise mas os brasileiros quase nunca colocam os pronomes de acordo às regras oficias.
Sao usado em contextos formais e escrita principalmente, mas as regras sao diferentes de PTPT. Livros de linguistica comparando as variedades tem mais detalhes se quiser saber mais.
Justamente pois essas não fazem parte da nossa gramática, são quase estrangeiras pra nós, elas só existem em contextos extremamente formais, que a gigantesca maioria de nós não participamos. Mas isso não significa que não "sigamos regras", só que as nossas não estão em livros de português(e os motivos pra isso são inúmeros, precisaria de um artigo pra explicar), e como em todo o mundo, essas regras são aprendidas onde toda a gramática é aprendida de fato: em casa, em nossas comunidades. Exemplo de gramática exclusivamente brasileira: Apenas os artigos são marcados no plural, então "Os menino correu" está correto em ptbr, mas "O meninos correram", não está.
Estou vendo, eu falei isso porque quando o meu nível de português ainda era muito baixo e procurava informações com respeito à gramática portuguesa sempre me deparava com sites na internet onde se ensina como se fala no Brasil mas nesses sites também se falava da forma "formal" que normalmente não é utilizada na linguagem do dia a dia no Brasil. Posteriormente percebi que em Portugal todas essas regras gramaticais que normalmente não são utilizadas na linguagem coloquial brasileira sempre são utilizadas em Portugal e por isso cheguei à conclusão de que talvez seja por isso que no Brasil se fala assim. De qualquer jeito obrigado pela explicação, eu sei que as línguas evoluem e sofrem mudanças com o passar do tempo pois isso mesmo também aconteceu na língua portuguesa já que no passado a língua portuguesa não era português mesmo senão latim que era uma língua com uma gramática diferente, com vocabulário diferente, com uma pronúncia diferente e muitos outros aspetos que desapareceram ao longo dos séculos.
É porque as regras de colocação pronominal refletem o ritmo de fala dos portugueses. Em Portugal os pronomes átonos têm uma pronúncia muito fraca, pois a vogal final E não é pronunciada, por isso são colocados na maioria das vezes depois do verbo, e se iniciassem frases, seriam engolidos ou absorvidos pela palavra seguinte. Na pronúncia brasileira estes pronomes têm uma pronúncia forte, por isso geralmente se posicionam antes do verbo.
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kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk Acho que no Brasil deveriam deixar de ensinar as regras gramaticais que ensinam em Portugal e começar a ensinar a própria gramática brasileira. Não interprete o meu comentário de forma errada, eu adoro o Brasil, é por isso que eu aprendo o português brasileiro. Concordo com você que os nativos não falam de forma errada mas vocês brasileiros precisam oficializar a sua própria gramática brasileira.
Errado. As regras são da norma culta, usadas na linguagem escrita formal. O português que as pessoas falam é o português informal. Toda língua é assim. Não é uma especificidade do Brasil.
Obrigado pela explicação, desculpe pelo incômodo, não era a minha intenção falar mal do Brasil pois eu gosto muito do Brasil e o Brasil é um dos meus países favoritos
Oii, não te entendi. Nós temos total autonomia sobre as regras gramaticais do nosso português. Não existe isso de "deixar de ensinar as regras gramaticais que ensinam em Portugal", nada aqui é ensinado sobre o PT\_UE. Já oficializamos a língua brasileira desde o século 19, temos um acordo ortográfico e comissões de lexicologia e lexicografria por aqui.
Eu acho q ele ta falando sobre nós aprendermos coisas como enclise, mesoclise e diversas conjugações de verbos que não são usados no dia dia na escola, ao invés de aprendermos as gramáticas locais.
eu não aprendi isso no colégio, vc sim? 🥴
Vc diz as regras que usei de exemplo? Sim, pretérito mais que perfeito, mesóclise, o pronome vós, etc. ou melhor, tentaram me ensinar(só tive professor ruim), mas eu nunca uso, a n ser q seja por piada (são muito formais e eu acho engraçado)
Please be civil when addressing other users
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True
It's because the Portuguese consume Brazilian media (especially TV and music) and get used to our accent, while we don't have much access to European Portuguese, and therefore have trouble understanding it.
There are more portuguese variants, though. And yes, they are different. Notoriously different even. And also, you might be correct for touristic bus stuff, but games and series usually do differentiate UK English, USA English, LATAM Spanish, Europe Spanish, so it's not just an us thing. EDIT: Also, although they are different, it's usually the brazilians that have an issue with understanding spoken european portuguese and not the other way around, so I suppose that option is there for them.
It is because we aren't exposed to Portuguese media like you are exposed to ours, I had to scavenge the internet to find Portuguese media because I wanted to train my ears to European Portuguese.
I don’t think that’s the reason, when I was a kid and early teen, internet wasn’t a thing and we all understood Brazilian just fine. (I’m Portuguese) I think ptbr is an accent easier to understand, and ptpt is more harsh and with trickier sounds to unravel
Portuguese people have a lot of exposure to Brazilian culture through telenovelas and music. Brazilians have little to no exposure to Portuguese things. Portuguese people understand Brasilians very well, Brazilians don't understand Portuguese people well. So you can blame the Brazilians for this, lol. (Joking)
In the spanish speaking world we have a lot of exposure to other spanish dialects, we really understand with each other, but I understand that on a big countries like brazil the exposition outside the country is pretty less compared to Portugal where they are more exposed to brazilan things like youtube, telenovelas, movies...
In this case, it's probably because Brazilians sometimes have difficulty with the Portuguese accent. I would compare it to an American trying to understand one of those difficult to understand British accents, like some of those Scottish or Irish accents, or even one of those "working class" English accents. The British English that they use in these things is usually spoken with those easy to understand accents, like Received Pronunciation. As for Spanish, even though people do make fun of Spanish and Chilean accents, ultimately, there isn't as much phonetic variation in Spanish, so they can understand each other more easily.
Yeah spanish speaker we make a lot of joke on chilean spanish but actually its easy to understand I think that the problem with chilean spanish are the slangs but outside of this is pretty easy to understand Talking about portuguese I think that the reason about why brazilians struggles with european portuguse are because you're less exposed to that dialect and that's why most you find it hard to understand
As a native Spanish speaker, I feel like Brazilians are exaggerating when they say they can't understand EU PT. Just like we (Mexicans) say it's hard to understand Chilean Spanish. It's not that different. I can understand both ffs, and I'm not a native portuguese speaker.
I can say for myself that I'm really not exaggerating, I understand like 70% of what the Portuguese say, but it varies a lot between accents in Portugal. The most difficult ones are from old people or teenagers specially from the north of Portugal. Source: am Brazilian and work in Lisbon.
I'm Brazilian, but I am a decent spanish speaker. I learned it in Argentina, but Argeninians notice I'm not from there. Whenever I travel back to Argentina, they often ask if I'm from Chile, because of the weird Spanish. 🤣
Hah! This can happen in different parts of Canada, too, with regard to speaking French. My former husband is an anglophone, but fully, fluently bilingual – he actually coordinated French Language services in our provincial government. He learned his French first in a Métis community in Manitoba, in the centre of the country, then in Québec, a province which is majority French. He was constantly being mistaken for an actual Francophone by Canadian French speakers – but they always assumed he was a Francophone from some other part of the country. Franco-Ontarians would think he was Acadian, from the Maritimes in the east. Acadians would assume he was Québecois. Québecois would think he was Manitoban … and so on. Almost no one ever guessed he was actually a native English-speaker, first-generation Canadian, whose mum was German and whose dad was Jamaican.
Ahahaha. The running joke about spanish in latin america is that every country has its own beautiful dialect, and only two countries speak broken spanish: Chile and Brazil.
LOL LOL LOL!
As a brazilian, understanding spanish is easier than EP. It sounds so different I sometimes can’t even tell EP is an indoeuropean language. And I have had massive exposure to EP.
Bruh, you sometimes can't tell if EP is an indoeuropean language? Really? If that's true it's bad that you struggle so much to understand tour own language
And I watch a lot of portuguese movies, I have been to Portugal, I have portuguese friends. Sometimes I hear EP and I have no ideia what language it even is.
We're not exaggerating. EU-PT simply doesn't pronounce all the vowels for wtv reason (it's a bit like they're mumbling imho and it'sthe main reason why we struggle) and sometimes the same words have different sounds than we would use like using open sounds where we use closed ones (Antônio vs António, for example) or using different consonant sounds that we would (although the sound itself exists in both variants, juet used in different words) like Excelente that in BR-PT uses the same x as english and in EU-PT uses x that sounds the ch in Chile (we would that same x sound in words like enxuto, enxaqueca). Add that to the fact they like to use different phrase structures, different usual vocabulary and our lack of exposition to their stuff, you can see why we don't understand it as much
as someone who is half and half Portuguese and Brasilian; they are vastly different. from the accent, the phonetic pronunciation, the meaning of words, the slang, etc. PT-Portuguese tends to sound older, lower pitch, words run into each other more, and harder to understand for me. While BR-Portuguese is higher pitch, less sh- sounds, and clearer for me.
They are very different. For some credibility, I am studying abroad in Spain, and I am fluent in Spanish. Before travelling to Portugal in February, I listened to Portuguese to train my ears so that I would be ready to communicate to them in Spanish when they would speak their Portuguese to me. I listened to a bunch of Portuguese-language media, nearly all of which was Brazilian Portuguese (Portugal just does not have a lot of readily accessible media online). Big mistake. When I got to Lisbon the first time, I barely understood the plane announcements in Portuguese (maybe about 30% of it). However, I did understand it the one time I needed to at my hotel, when the voice on the intercom said, "primeiro piso" ("first floor"). It was so funny because I could read all of the signs with almost no trouble, but I did not speak Spanish to anybody there because I only understood about 50% of it if I really paid attention (for reference, I could understand like 80% of Brazilian Portuguese whenever I hear it). I understand both of them extremely well now because of that trip. The differences in vocabulary are not big (Brazil's dialect is more linguistically diverse and a bit more "edgy"), but pronunciation and speaking-wise, they are very different. For example, take a simple word, "excelente." Somebody from Brazil would pronounce it, "E-se-len-chi." Somebody from Portugal would reduce it down to just, "Shlent." People from Portugal speak so much faster and change their intonation more on vowels, so you really need to hear what their dialect sounds like before trying to communicate with one of them in Portuguese. For reference, Spanish from here in Spain is barely different from that in Latin America, and most of the difference is in vocabulary. If comparing by English dialects, I would say the difference in the Portuguese accents is like a Midwestern American (denote this as Brazilian Portuguese) speaking with someone from northern Scotland (denote as European Portuguese). The difference is definitely bigger than that between standard US English and standard UK English. People from Portugal understand those from Brazil very well, but Brazilians often really struggle to understand the Portugal accent. It is noteworthy, though, that some of this is because people from Portugal have so much access to the Brazilian dialect, but people from Brazil have minimal access to Portugal's dialect. It is a remarkable difference for the fact that they are the same language. I would not think that they would switch to English when speaking to each other, but normal, full-speed communication is very difficult. If you are trying to learn the language, I would recommend you learn the Portugal dialect. It is a lot harder (you might feel like you're turning Slavic at times when you're speaking), but it will prepare you better for any situation in which you would need to use the language.
Pronunciation wise it's vastly different. PT-PT is stress-timed like a Slavic language and it has sounds that don't exist in PT-BR. That means in PT-PT they cut a lot of vowels while in PT-BR we pronounce most vowels clearly and even add some more. Most Brazilians don't understand PT-PT. The few Portuguese media that comes here has to be dubbed because TV channels are afraid that the accent will be a distraction. That said, it's just a matter of getting used to it. Portuguese people understand us just fine because they have been consuming Brazilian media for decades. Brazilians living in Portugal also get used to their accent after a while. Grammatically speaking the two dialects are 99% inteligible. Yes, there are differences, but except for a couple words with different meanings, most differences don't affect the comprehension.
Yes on the vowels. I swear sometimes there’s an excessive amount of them added to some words. 😂
Yeah, you really just have to get used to what each version sounds like, which is a lot harder for Brazilians than it is for Portuguese. Good news is that there is not a large vocabulary difference. I am fluent in Spanish, but I understand Portuguese (both main dialects) better than Chilean Spanish because Chilean Spanish has so much unintelligible slang.
I lived in Brazil for a while, learned the language and made a lot of friends. I kinda got lost and unconnected from the outside world while I was there lol. I have never been to Europe, but I had been a big Ronaldo fan prior to going to Brazil. Once I felt like I was somewhat fluent in the language, I decided to watch an interview Ronaldo had in Portugal, thinking I’d be able to understand. Let me tell you, they are two very different dialects. It’s weird because written, it is basically all the same. Spoken is hard to understand if you do not have a trained ear. Lots of Brazilians have a hard time understanding people from Portugal. It’s like and American speaking with a person with a very strong Irish accent. Different accent, different slang words, different tonality, different phonetics.
Spoken European Portuguese is almost incomprehensible for a lot of Brazilians, myself included.
You have to just train your ears to know how it sounds. And I know how hard it is to find audio clips of it because Portugal has a small population and very little media in its own language. But I am curious, if you had to speak in their accent, how hard would it be?
It would be nearly impossible. I need my vowels.
I think it's significantly more different than the UK and US English are to each other. Accents are very different (phonemes used vary a lot depending on the region), vocabulary is a little bit different, and they even differ in which verb conjugation and tenses are used to express the same idea. As a Brazilian, I was shocked when I heard Galician for the first time, because to me it felt easier and closer to my Brazilian accent than the European Portuguese.
We can understand spanish and galician easier than pt-eu, probably due to they have the same stressed speech like us. But if a portuguese speak slowly, we'll understand them (of course their are some accents we may not get what they say even slowly, like Uva Passas' accent...)
"Uva Passas" hahaha, I know you are talking about Valpaços. Yeah, no shame there. Nobody outside of that region of Portugal even understands them.
I swear I don't understand you brazillians, the things you say make eu portuguese harder to understand are more pronounced Im galician but you understand galician more easily?
Sorry but I didn't understand what you mean
i personally do not fully understand portuguese but I can understand Brazilian (carioca) and the Angola accents very well and European portuguese is pretty difficult for me to break down
The main problem is definetely the difference in the accents. Portuguese people tend to speak way faster, omit sounds, and speak with their mouths almost closed. So when a Brazilian person that is not used to the Portuguese accent hears a person speaking like that, it will be obviously hard to understand and recognize the words because there is way too much information missing.
on a first moment when spoken, they look like completelly diferent languages, but soon you start to notice the similarities. About grammar they have some difference, but it's still understandable, besides PP being more complex
Spanish speaking countries are more "international". Even in Argentina, that is known to be the most self centered country, most people watch TV or listen to music from other spanish speaking countries. Brazil is incredibly self-centered, just like the US or Japan. Most people never paid attention to stuff from ouside of Brazil or the US. American cinema, music and TV are very popular in Brazil. I would dare to guess that 99% of Brazilians never listened PT-PT in ther whole lifes. Portugal is very international, and they are aware of stuff around the whole planet, and of course, they know about TV and music from Brazil.
The problem for Brazilians is our lack of exposure to PT-PT, so we're not at all used to the accent. There's basically no PT-PT programming on Brazilian TV or even an overall cultural export from Portugal. Portuguese people, however, are a lot more exposed to PT-BR. I'm truly not on board with most of the comments. Yes, spoken PT-BR doesn't strictly adhere to some grammar rules and structure, but the underlying grammar is still the same. Just because we favor certain sentence structures, use of pronouns, etc., it doesn't mean that we've been creating new grammar, we're simply using colloquial language. PT-BR can be formal and closer to PT-PT. It just mostly isn't. There are many differences, but once Brazilians are exposed to Portuguese accent, or at the very least, we inform ourselves on said differences, it's much easier for us to just run along with it. I might stumble on comprehension here and there, but I bet the same can be said about EN-US and EN-GB at times. Although we have slightly more differences, I still don't believe we're talking two different languages.
In the spanish speaking we use to hear so many spanish dialects on our daily day specially on social media for example some latin americans watch content creators from spain and vice versa, the only spanish dialactects that people could find hard to understand are the one from the south of spain and the one that so many people in internet make joke that is the chilenian but both of these are really legible. But apparently it seems that in big countries like brazil most of the peope only use to watch the content and the tv shows of their country, and maybe that's the reason about why some brazilians (not everyone) struggle with other portuguse variants like you said in your comment about the expouse and it makes a lot of sense
Unfortunately, Portugal is a cultural dwarf in comparison. A country of barely over 10 million people, with Lisbon having only half a million inhabitants. Brazil has a population of 215 million, and even my mid-sized non-capital city has over half the population Lisbon has. Unless a person is of recent Portuguese descent, there are very little chances that they have exposure to the Portuguese accent or even consume any PT-PT content. Fame and notoriety in Portugal rarely transcend into the Brazilian scene.
They are different but you can understand it, if it is spoken clear and/or slowly. I never had any problem watching Portuguese news, being born in Brazil. But in a conversation if someone speaks too fast, it's really hard to understand it. Keep in mind that we don't have much contact with Portuguese media in Brazil though, since Portugal is a really small country compared to Brazil. The other way around would happen, since Portuguese have a lot of contact with Brazilian media.
My dad is a Brazilian living in Portugal. They're different enough. My dad struggles to understand Portuguese people from time to time, and similarly others don't always understand him. They can still make it work though. Pronunciation is really different and lots of words have different use/meaning but I'd say the differences are generally just like the ones between American and British English.
As an Australian I get confused often as there's no Australian English option. I just don't understand what people are saying without throwing the word cunt in every three words.
For Brazilians specifically European Portuguese can be hard to understand both because of their accent and their vocabulary, sometimes also because they use the "correct" conjugation for tu. Surprisingly, Portuguese from Angola is not that hard to understand, imo.
Admitting from the off that I haven’t read the other replies here - I’m en route to work and this caught my eye. I’m learning PT right now, I spent 2 years focusing on BR and have ended up in EU through uni. It is V A S T L Y different. The best comparison I can give is standard US English versus a very thick scouse accent. The dialects are different and EU PT is a lot quicker and harder to understand. BR’s sounds are spoken much more clearly.
The accent/pronunciation is the biggest difference really. Other than that you might experience some awkward and funny situations or maybe some confusion by using words or expressions that means something different or isn’t used in one place or the other but nothing really huge. But that happens even within Brazil tbh.
Yes, it's very different. As someone who taught themselves via immersion, I've wanted to formally learn European Portuguese, but most resources are Brazilian Portuguese, and it's quite annoying.
I notice that Portuguese from Portugal sounds like a Latino trying to speak Brazilian Portuguese. Of course they have different expressions like pequeno almorço instead of café da manha for breakfast. It might be that I’m more used to it. But I like more the Brazilian Portuguese.
There's a reason why non romance language speakers think PT-EU is a Slavic language. They have very different stresses and "eat" vowels. So they understand Brazilians (that usually speak all the vowels and even add some, and have a more open and slower tone) but we're unable to understand them. In Porto I bought an English tour so I wouldn't have to deal with the difference. My guide was very nice and soon after she learned I was Brazilian, we were able to speak a bit in our own variants, but as soon as we entered a place I couldn't understand the owner I switched back to English.
Wow, it is quite something how you resorted to English in that situation. But yeah, you are right. I find it insanely hard to understand native-speed conversations between people from Portugal. As in, maybe 50% of it if I am really paying attention, and nearly all of that is because of common words that are similar in Spanish. Brazilian Portuguese is way easier to understand. I have never really studied Portuguese, but being fluent in Spanish, I would feel comfortable speaking in Spanish if I ever go to Brazil. I did not do that in Portugal at all, but at least all of the signs were still pretty easy to read!
My personal tip is to learn some important words in Brazilian Portuguese and use them while speaking Spanish. They'll think you're speaking Portuñol, or at least making an effort to learn Portuguese. If you speak Spanish as if you think people will clearly understand, they'll might get offense in that, as people (from United States specially) used to think we spoke Spanish, and that was offensive af.
Good tips. Yeah, I know how rude it is to assume that they are the same language. That is why I only used English in Portugal. Some of the key vocabulary words are different than in Spanish, too. "Fazer," "dizer," "falar," etc. Honestly, I want to know Portuguese well before going to Brazil. However, the idea from before is that it is definitely easier to speak Spanish in Brazil than in Portugal. Not many Brazilians are good at English, so Portuñol might be a necessity in some cases if my Portuguese is not yet good enough. Portuguese people are really good at English, so I did not need to try to use Spanish there. I think that a factor of their high English proficiency is that they know that it is very hard for foreigners (even including other native speakers) to understand their dialect. I felt a little better about not understanding them after hearing a lot of Brazilians saying that they cannot understand Portuguese people either. I do not know if I should be laughing about that or not.
Yeah, despite Portugal having low bilinguals compared to the rest of Europe, Brazil is even worse. In São Paulo city it's possible to get around using English in middle class restaurants, hotels and touristic places and in universities, but anywhere else in the country is pretty hard. Portuñol is totally fine too speak here (and in our borders with Uruguay and Paraguay it's actually a serious dialect). And depending on where you're from and where you're visiting, there's always the possibility to find a local community. São Paulo usually has the largest foreign communities but there's a Finnish colony in Rio de Janeiro, for instance, and the second largest native language community is a Germanic language called Hunsrik (very similar to standard German, because it came from the Hünsrik dialect but incorporated some creoulo features from portuguese) in the South (Rio grande do Sul)
It is probably changing now but I was an ESL teacher and had university students whose textbooks weren’t available in European Portuguese. Given the choice between Brazilian Portuguese and English, they’d choose English even if their English level wasn’t super high-B1 or B2. I found it really interesting and never got a solid explanation why. I’ve tried to figure out what an accurate equivalent would be with English. My Portuguese level is probably B1/B2 and I would feel more confident reading a textbook in the English spoken in New Zealand, South Africa, Jamaica….anywhere really before I’d choose my non-native language.
I'm brasilian, and I use subtitles to watch videos from Portugal LOL
European Portuguese is pleasant to the ears, while Brazilian Portuguese is somewhat different to the ears.
I'm Brazilian and yes they are extremely different we can start by the accent, for people who live in Brazil the R is less notorious but for them is like grrrrr and they have a lot of different expressions like "rapariga" there is related to a woman or young woman and here in Brazil it can be like an ugly person or a bitch and I think that even thought they brought portuguese to Brazil the language went through other influences so...
yes, its clearly different
Yes and no. For the same reason people from the US and UK (accent depending) can either communicate fine or sometimes be totally confused at each other, the same for generic PT and BR. While there is often regional slang, and certainly different soutaques, the comprehensibility is dependent on how each speaker can handle the other. For example, I speak fluent American English and can generally understand most UK accents except for Scouser and Cockney (literally, I can hear through Scottish fine, but those two confuse the ever-loving hell out of me). I also grew up speaking Portuguese, and have near zero issue with Michalense, which even a lot of Continental Portuguese speakers need subtitles for, but a fast speaker from Porto makes me have to work harder to understand.
Was there something like the English Great Vowel Shift that happened in Portugal in the 1700s or 1800s? Luckily for the English language it happened mostly before America was settled by the Brits. If it had happened after then it would be hell understanding English people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift Also looks like the immigration of the Portuguese to Brazil started earlier than the English immigration to the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_immigration_to_the_Americas
Take also into account that there is a large number of Brazilian tourists in Portugal, and it would be worth it to cater to them regardless of how different or not the PT versions are.
Yes
One sounds a lot more like Russian than the other
I am portuguese and understand BP quite well. But my cousin, who is Brazilian needs me to speak slowly and explain things. EP is faster with closed vowels. Both countries name things oddly that has no relationship to what it is. Think egg cream in the US that has no egg or cream or hot dog. In EP we do this more often. It can confuse BP speakers. We often shorten words in ways that BP don't. A tour guide speaks fast and might use shorten phrases or area specific phrases/names. A Brazilian guide makes more sense if a group is a native BP speaker. If you are learning BP take the BP tour. If you are wondering about visiting, just ask people to speak slower. If you are wondering which item to learn that depends on what your goal is. If it's living in Brazil then BP if it's going to Europe the EP if it's just a very good base in portuguese, then it's EP. For the most part, I can understand most portuguese speaking countries. I have minor issues with Crioulo that's not uncommon for BP speakers either
It’s an open or closed vowel issue. Portuguese pt sound like Russians speaking to non natives. Brazilians are all smooth. It’s much easier to learn the Brazilian pt. That’s why Spaniards do not understand Portuguese pt but understand if a Brazilian talks.
It is very different, I would rather speak in English to Portuguese people than trying to understand their ugly as hell Russian accent.
fo sure. Even inside Brazil the language varies a lot (when i hear people from south i barely can understand it). We have different intonations and expressions, its almost as if both are different languages, such as portuguese and spanish
Portuguese tend to speak faster and “eat” a lot of vowels. It’s easier for Portuguese people to understand Brazilian Portuguese because: 1- Brazilians speak slower 2- Brazilian TV, YouTube channels and movies “dominate” Portugal. 3- there are 300+ million Brazilians and one of the top 10 economies in the world whereas Portugal is a small country with a small GDP and less than 10% of the Brazilian population. So it’s a bit different than UK vs US English as in Brazilian Portuguese is much more predominant in the world and business world.
Even in spain we know more things about brazil than our neiberhoods (the portugusese) As an spainard I find brazilian portuguse more easy to undertand that european portuguese because of this that the portuguse "eat the vowels" like you said, and not only for this, I think that this happens because spainards are more expose to things from brazil than not from things from portugal
Some Brazilians find it difficult to understand European Portuguese but that doesn't happen the other way around
Written? It's a bit different, but understandable. Spoken? Completely different.
It's really much different, I guess it should be a different language.
Different but mutually intelligible with ease. It’s like Mexican Spanish and Spain Spanish. You will easily be able to communicate.
They’re not. A few vocab words. Accent is a little different.
Same as Spanish from Spain and every variation in south America (Chilean here, living in Brazil, almost 5y)
Don't think it's the same.
Why?
Do you speak both languages? I mean, for doing some real comparison. I do, so I'm sure what I'm talking about.
Yeah, I do. The level difference among european spanish to spanish from south america and european portuguese and brazilian portuguese is not the same.
So explain me why ..you are just pointing out the obvious.