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What variant of Portuguese are you learning?


Kotro

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As a Portuguese I think the Brazilian variant might be easier to learn but I don't think this distinction matter much because you'll be able to communicate with either variant, they are the same language, just some different vocabulary which can be easily explained with words common to both variants. :)

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  • 2 weeks later...

I actually started out on a course where I was taught mostly European Portuguese but I didn't get very far before I visited Brazil for the first time. And that was where I learned to speak the language. Later I continued my studies in my home country and found it quite confusing because the grammar I was taught was not how my Brazilian friends talked at all. ;)

I find Portuguese people speaking quite hard to understand but of course it is the same language, so I suppose I would get used to the accent rather soon if I was to spend more time in Portugal or in another Portuguese speaking country. To be honest I don't understand many Brazilians either, there are so many different accents and some people just don't speak clearly. 

I've been to Portugal twice, briefly, and I am always somehow a little ashamed of my Brazilian accent there, I don't know why really. Surely the people can understand that I'm a foreigner and just happened to learn Portuguese in Brazil. But to answer the question why Brazilian? I didn't really plan that. I wanted to learn Portuguese and then I just had the idea of going to Brazil and fell in love with the country. Well, actually my first contact with the language was listening to Brazilian music, so maybe that was the ultimate reason?

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Good question Kotro, as Portuguese I never really think of this as a "variant", but it's interesting. I think most people learn "Brazilian" for the reasons groselha says, it's a much bigger country.

You don't need to be ashamed of your accent lol, most people will just think you're Brazilian, we have thousands of Brazilians in Portugal, it's a pretty common situation.

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In Portugal, we are used to receiving and serving foreigners, we speak their language most of the time so it's nice to see a foreigner trying to speak our language instead of English, we will do our best to understand you and make sure you understand us. We love tourists that try to speak our language so don't feel bad if you speak Portuguese with a weird accent, we welcome you either way.  :grin:

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I have a teacher here where I work that insists in speaking English with me despite she is here in Portugal for over 3 or 4 years. She speaks a decent Portuguese, it's understandable, so I really don't get why she hides behind her English.

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I have a teacher here where I work that insists in speaking English with me despite she is here in Portugal for over 3 or 4 years. She speaks a decent Portuguese, it's understandable, so I really don't get why she hides behind her English.

I have a few people like that where I work as well, they try to speak Portuguese if we are having a casual conversation, but if it's work-related then they default back to English, they are probably just afraid of making some language mistake that leads to a big work problem :)

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I have a teacher here where I work that insists in speaking English with me despite she is here in Portugal for over 3 or 4 years. She speaks a decent Portuguese, it's understandable, so I really don't get why she hides behind her English.

That happens with me as well. I had a teacher in a language institute that only speaks English with his students despite living in Portugal for over 20 years, we only know he speaks perfect Portuguese because he went to the Portuguese "who wants to be a millionaire?".  :grin:

He's a really cool guy (in his mid thirties) and a great teacher. He said we should keep practicing our English with him even if he hasn't been our teacher for over 6 years.

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That is very generous from him andre-nunes, instead of practicing his Portuguese he allows you to practice English, I wouldn't mind that! You only realized he spoke a good Portuguese because you saw that on TV? After 20 years in Portugal that should not be surprising! :)

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  • 1 year later...

I am confused now I was not aware that there are several kinds of Portuguese language. Is this language similar to Spanish? If I know Spanish will it make it easier to learn Portuguese? Which kind is widely used?

Hi. Actually there are not that many variants. Generally speaking you have European Portuguese (from Portugal) and Brazilian Portuguese (from Brazil). They are very similar IF spoken correctly.

As a native portuguese I don't think it's THAT similar to spanish. But yeah if you know some spanish it will be easy for you to understand a few things in portuguese  :wink:

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