Red Eric

We should do a funny handshake or something.

macliam

My experience, in the hills of Andalucia, is that speaking Castillian is useful, but doesn't help when those spreaking back to you use their own dialect. In Portugal, the language is more homogenous..... I have had little dificulty understanding what anyone has said to me.... apart from my 84 year-old, toothless, Alentejano neighbour. However, my friends from Lisbon have had almost as much difficulty with him as I do!! Speaking Spanish in Portugal is better than nothing - and more Portuguese understand Spanish than VV - but is about as useful as speaking broad Scots in England.

bons

It's not intentional, I just start blurting out Spanish.

macliam

That reminds me of my first ever trip to Rome. I was with 2 friends and between us we spoke French, Castillian and German but no Italian. We had already discovered the fallacy of "fluency" when my leaving cert French was more widely understood in France than my friend who had a 2.1 in French and German, but at that time it seemed that the extent of most Italians English was "Okay, okay, Miami Beach"...... So whilst Spanish was useful for interpreting road signs, etc., my friend's German was the go-to for asking any questions. However, two of us smoked - and not the one who spoke German - so when we discovered the "odd" idea of Cigarettes only being available in specific shops, it left us with a problem. For years afterwards, I wondered what the shopkeepers thought about being asked for cigarettes in Castillian!!

campos

I do find Brazilian Portuguese more melodious and attractive but I won't be settling there so I'd better get used to Euro version. Also, I find certain grammars of those my brief study has exposed me too from Brazil more similar to English, such as imperfect indicative- 'eu estava trabalhando quando o carteiro veio' (whereas the Euro PT would use the infinitive, '...a trabalhar...').

macliam

The grammatical differences are largely due to the exterior influences on Brazilian and immigration from non-Portuguese speakers, much as the vocabulary often differs due to insular development and the adoption of "new" terms. However, as with Castillian, a far higher percentage of Portuguese understand Brazilian than VV... so whilst it's "wrong", you're likely to get by with Brazilian. Of course, Brazilian also varies geographically and the familar "carioca" accent is not general (and some expressions vary too). Personally, I find the odd pronunciation of words to be an annoyance (bom apetite being "bom apaicheecheh", losing "r"s, etc.)

bons

When I first heard Portuguese I though it was russian or something like that.

macliam

That's not unusual.....there are familiar sounds. It's worse when they are speaking English.

In hospital in the UK, one of my nurses was an alfacinha, so we chatted away happily. There was an auxilliary who delivered food, etc. and I took her to be Russian (or similar), from her accent. On my last day, my nurse was with me when the auxialliary arrived... "Oh, you speak Portuguese!" she said, sounding less Russian. Of course, I presumed it was due towhere she came from...... but, as it turned out, she was an alfacinha too!

EU.flag

And when you first time heard Russian, you thought it was Portuguese ? :-)

macliam

I think people have more exposure to Russian.....

suiko

I think the "Russian" thing is mostly about the "s" pronounced as "sh". Other issues stem from the fact that Portuguese is stress-timed, like English but unlike any other Romance languages as far as I know, which means a lot of the unstressed syllables are difficult to hear at all. This is why (syllable-timed) Brazilian Portuguese is so much easier to understand (I was managing better in Brazil after 3 weeks than after my initial year in Portugal in the 90s).

I do find it amusing how Portuguese seem to see Brazilian as more of a separate language than a variant form. This is quite different to Spanish in the "old" and "new" worlds (this may have to do with the huge variations within Spain, or the fact that Brazilian Portuguese varies more in grammar as well as lexis, but I do wonder if there's something else at play). Maybe someone who's been in Portugal a while could throw some light on how the Portuguese see Angolan and Mozambican Portuguese?

At this early stage I often have big problems understanding the simplest things people say to me, which is frustrating as I can more or less express what I want to say and can read Portuguese easily of course. Of course this is made worse by not being able to lip read either (how much worse I will probably never find out as masks will still be around when hopefully my Portuguese will have improved!)

And then there's the issue of my simple brain not being able to handle more than four languages. French has its own compartment as I learnt it at 5 or 6, and Spanish is fluent from years in Spain and Latin America. So Italian and Portuguese jostle unceremoniously with each other in the other compartment. Hopefully Italian will get kicked out for the moment once I'm in Portugal (I learnt that entirely through osmosis so I'm sure it can be resuscitated when required by the same method).

Red Eric

Phonetically, I think there are some other commonly heard similarities - the "zh" sound of j and soft g (as in Jorge, for example), the nh and lh, and the dark l all spring to mind.

I can't say I find Brazilian Portuguese at all easy to listen to or understand - I really need subtitles for Brazilian films even now I actually find it easier to listen to eg a Spanish news bulletin than understand spoken Brazilian, although I wouldn't be able to watch a film in Spanish only.

I presume the stress-timing is what makes it so hard to pinpoint a foreign speaker of English as Portuguese, though? They don't seem to have any easily identifiable patterns or markers that give them away in the same way as French, Spanish, Italian or speakers of a number of other languages do.

macliam

My cousin from LA learned his Spanish from the guys working for his father (a racehorse trainer) and was comfortable conversing in it, without ever having lessons. Then he was posted to Europe.... and one of his first meetings was in Madrid. He walked in, greeted the customers and continued in "Spanish", until one of them stopped him and said, quite pointedly "I suggest we continue the meeting in English". He was fairly crushed..... so I'm not sure I'd agree that the Brazilian/Portuguese thing doesn't occur with the variants of Spanish.

For me, the "Russian" thing doesn't happen in Portuguese, it happens when some Portuguese speak English.... it's just the way English words are changed by Portuguese pronunciation. I have no problem understanding most people speaking Portuguese.... certainly less problems than understanding some strongly dialectic English (apart from my aged neighbour, as previously) and I find the pronunciation very logical (far moreso than English). However, I guess my background makes me "different", because most Portuguese seem to think an Irishman speaking Portuguese is as unlikely as a Brazilian dentist being qualified........ in fact some friends get a bit annoyed when I occasionally drop into English when speaking to SWMBO (and I understand their annnoyance, but it's a natural thing between us) because they can't imagine that I'd find anything easier to say in English than in Portuguese!!

As to Brazilian being easier or nicer to learn than Portuguese, there are significant differences in the two languages, but the telenovelas have exposed the Portuguese to Brazilian, whereas many Brazilians seem to think they speak the "real" Portuguese and everyone else is just "wrong". It may be that exposure to one makes converting to the other very difficult - the issues Brazilian tourists have are legendary. It may also be easier for someone used to speaking Spanish to "convert". However, the language in Brazil varies across the regions, both in accent and expressions - so, like "Spanish" it seems to be a more collection of dialects, with an "official" language but many regional variants (some very different, like Catalan of Galego). I have Angolan friends and it seems the language in use in Africa and elsewhere is much closer to that spoken in Portugal..... there are some oddities of pronunciation from people in Madeira or the Azores - but nobody comes close to the "classic" Brazilian accent.

suiko

Yep, I'm sure you're right about the "zh", Eric, and also probably about the stress-timed thing making it much easier for Portuguese to speak unmarked English.

I think anyone who comes to Portuguese already speaking Spanish or Italian will tend to find Brazilian Portuguese easier simply because it sounds more broadly similar, being syllable-timed. Obviously it will be different for someone who's learnt Portuguese from scratch in Portugal.

Many Spaniards dislike Latin American Spanish for a variety of reasons, but that doesn't mean they consider it a different language. Sorry, but I still can't accept the concept of Brazilian Portuguese being a separate language. They are two forms of the same language which have diverged considerably (and this is of course a generalisation given the multiple variants in Portugal and especially Brazil).

campos

I was wondering what could happen if one's residency registration before 31 December was refused on grounds of insufficient income. If one has taken out a 6 month rental, going into 2021, would one have to abandon this?