Question for Portuguese learners (code-switching?)

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Question for Portuguese learners (code-switching?)

Postby Ug_Caveman » Tue Nov 15, 2022 9:08 pm

Hello to all the lusophones on the forum,

A purely academic question/discussion (which I'm sure I'm going to phrase in an awful and confusing way):

Obviously Portuguese comes in two main varieties with (as I understand it) greater difference between its European and South American variants than Spanish has (especially with regard to pronunciation.)

My question is - if you were studying Portuguese from a viewpoint of wanting to only use one particular variety over the other, would you still see value in studying the other?

So if you wanted to live in Brazil full time, would there be value in studying some Iberian Portuguese materials after you'd exhausted all the Brazilian ones, or would that likely be counterproductive due to the significant differences between the two?

(I'm only curious as I was watching Langfocus on autoplay earlier and was quite surprised to hear just how significant the differences were between the two varieties of Portuguese were - I doubt I'll personally study Portuguese anytime soon)
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Re: Question for Portuguese learners (code-switching?)

Postby Iversen » Tue Nov 15, 2022 9:37 pm

Long ago at the university I followed a course in comparative Romance (i.e. using one language as a scaffold to learn the others), and the professor spoke Brazilian Portuguese - but it was a marginal thing in the course, and we didn't really learn anything. Later I took up the language again on my own, and I tried it first out on Cabo Verde, later in Moçambique and Portugal itself, where I got to a level where I could have conversations and watch TV etc. without any problems. So at that stage my Portuguese was clearly European.

I had visited Iguaçu and Rio in 2002, but at that time I still couldn't speak Portuguese and didn't even try - I concocted a few written sentences for postcards, but that was just like solving a riddle. However during my second visit in 2019 to Recife and Natal I refused to speak anything than Portuguese (and nobody objected), and during those two weeks my pronunciation switched in the direction of Brazilian Portuguese (or a variant thereof). And now a partial answer to your question: I flew to Brazil with TAP so on my way to and from Brazil I had a short stay in Lisboa, and I had no problems switching back in the direction of a more Europan pronunciation. OK, during the return trip I still had the long vowels and other features from Brazilian Portuguese, but I had no problems whatsoever communicating with the Lisboetas, so apparently having a pronunciation from one side of the Atlantic doesn't scare those from the other side.

I rarely meet Lusophones these days, but I guess that the voice inside my head mainly speaks Portuguese Portuguese again, but with some sounds affected by the Brazilian variant - notably the vowels. And I don't see that as a problem.
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Re: Question for Portuguese learners (code-switching?)

Postby lingua » Tue Nov 15, 2022 9:43 pm

I chose the Iberian because it's unlikely that I'd ever go to Brazil while I've been to Portugal a couple of times and plan to return multiple times in the future as well as spend extended time there in retirement.

There are a few differences in usage but these are minor issues and would generally be pointed out in textbooks or other learning materials.

You'll find though that the amount of resources for Brazilian Portuguese are significantly higher than for Iberian so that could be a consideration. I had to search pretty extensively to find a handful of good Iberian resources and I find it very difficult to find books that are appropriate for my level by Portuguese authors so I read a fair amount by Brazilian authors and have minimal confusion. I've found the majority of translated books into Portuguese are done in Brazil.
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Re: Question for Portuguese learners (code-switching?)

Postby iguanamon » Tue Nov 15, 2022 10:43 pm

I learned mostly Brazilian Portuguese. I have spent a lot of time in Portugal. I have never had any problems being understood or understanding while there. There are plenty of Brazilian immigrants living in Portugal. There are Portuguese; Angolan; Mozambican; and Cape Verdian immigrants in Brazil. They are, indeed, able to live and work in both Portugal and Brazil.

Code switching? Maybe a little in the use of some words like "Metro" vs "Metrô", "Bonde/Bondinha" vs "Eléctrico". I spoke mostly with Brazilian pronunciation; usage/grammar; and vocabulary in Portugal with no problems at all.

My advice is the same for Portuguese as it is for Spanish, "just learn Portuguese". The basic language is the same with some minor differences. Slang, yes, it's different... as slang is different between different countries/regions in English. Don't worry about it. It's all Portuguese.

Here's a video of the late Jô Soares of Brazil doing an interview with the famous Portuguese writer, José Saramago. They can obviously communicate with each other and the audience can understand Saramago. Neither one has to adjust their speech or language.

When learning, I concentrated on Brazilian Portuguese, but I also used resources from Portugal and Mozambique.
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Re: Question for Portuguese learners (code-switching?)

Postby Diomedes » Fri Dec 23, 2022 11:13 pm

I know I got here late, but after a year in which I was much less active in this forum than I would have liked, here are my two cents.

The other posts are well-founded, but as a native (brazilian) speaker, I'm afraid I'm just a bit less optimistic about mutual intelligibility between those two variants of portuguese.

Is it possible to get along in european portuguese if you have only learnt brazilian portuguese? Yes, and vice-versa. But, as I see, it will harder than if we were spoking about european vs. latin american spanish.

Some years ago, I went to Buenos Aires, and there was a spanish course for tourists (I didn't take it) in which they used the Nuevo Ven method. That is, an european spanish method. Perhaps due to the fact that there are so many spanish-speaking countries, or other reasons, the european variant, or something close to it, is more or less accepted as some kind of lingua franca, and the formal register of the local variants don't differ so much from this "norm".

In Brazil, that would not happen. Even if there were attempts of unify the grammatical and orthographic rules, it never worked. I never heard of any brazilian teaching portuguese with an european portuguese book. It would be very cumbersome.

Portuguese people, in particular, are wary about the preservation of their variant. Recently, there was some news about portuguese parents forbidding their kids to access the internet, and it was not because of pornography. It was something "worse": portuguese children suddenly started to "talk like brazilians", influenced by brazilian youtubers!

Jokes aside (and I'm not that keen on brazilian youtubers either), my answer to the OP would be: if you want to live in Brazil full time, well, always try to avoid Iberian Portuguese materials, as they may confound you even after you'd exhausted the Brazilian books.

Perhaps when you are very, very confortable in the brazilian variant AND if you also developed an interest on portuguese culture (which I love), you should pick up some european portuguese materials. For this purpose, I own a copy of Assimil for european portuguese ("Le Nouveau Portugais Sans Peine")!

A contrario sensu, if your focus is on Portugal and portuguese culture, I suggest iberian portuguese materials only.

Having said that, it's reconforting to read that some portuguese learners found no trouble in the interchange between those variants.
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Re: Question for Portuguese learners (code-switching?)

Postby piotr » Sat Dec 24, 2022 12:26 am

Ug_Caveman wrote:Obviously Portuguese comes in two main varieties with (as I understand it) greater difference between its European and South American variants than Spanish has (especially with regard to pronunciation.)
My personal impression is that the degree of divergence among the dialects of Spanish, Portuguese, and English, are all pretty comparable. I'd say the difference between Portuguese and Spanish is that the Brazilian Portuguese in very well-standardised as a stand-alone variant, whereas the Royal Spanish Academy for ideological reasons during the last three hundred year struggled to unify dialects. In consequence, you can find e.g., orthographic differences between the variants of Portuguese or English, which can only very exceptionally be found in Spanish (e.g., fútbol vs futbol). Brazilians can easily accept their grammatical innovations as the "standard" without asking anyone for permission... ;) , whereas the Royal Spanish Academy can be quite conservative and has always been strongly pro-Spaniard.

Ug_Caveman wrote:My question is - if you were studying Portuguese from a viewpoint of wanting to only use one particular variety over the other, would you still see value in studying the other?

So if you wanted to live in Brazil full time, would there be value in studying some Iberian Portuguese materials after you'd exhausted all the Brazilian ones, or would that likely be counterproductive due to the significant differences between the two?

The basics of the other variant: yes, but just the basics to improve your understanding (A2?).

Diomedes wrote:The other posts are well-founded, but as a native (brazilian) speaker, I'm afraid I'm just a bit less optimistic about mutual intelligibility between those two variants of portuguese.

It's completely credible but you should be CAREFUL stating this on this particular forum--I know why I'm saying this. :lol:

Diomedes wrote:Is it possible to get along in european portuguese if you have only learnt brazilian portuguese? Yes, and vice-versa. But, as I see, it will harder than if we were spoking about european vs. latin american spanish.

Some years ago, I went to Buenos Aires, and there was a spanish course for tourists (I didn't take it) in which they used the Nuevo Ven method. That is, an european spanish method. Perhaps due to the fact that there are so many spanish-speaking countries, or other reasons, the european variant, or something close to it, is more or less accepted as some kind of lingua franca, and the formal register of the local variants don't differ so much from this "norm".

Yeah, I fully agree with you. What happens is that Brazilian Portuguese is well-standarised as a stand-alone dialect. For ideological reasons the Spanish Language never had so much luck as Portuguese in this regard and has always been treated as "just one language" even after the independence of given countries... Also, Brazil is also just one huge country and not subdivided into 10 or more middle-sized countries, so you have little dilemma which variant should be taught. It's more easy to produce materials for Brazilian Portuguese--there's no such thing as "Latin American Spanish" as each country has "its own Spanish but rather poorly-regulated".

Diomedes wrote:Portuguese people, in particular, are wary about the preservation of their variant. Recently, there was some news about portuguese parents forbidding their kids to access the internet, and it was not because of pornography. It was something "worse": portuguese children suddenly started to "talk like brazilians", influenced by brazilian youtubers!

That is so much worse than pornography... :lol:
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Re: Question for Portuguese learners (code-switching?)

Postby Diomedes » Sat Dec 24, 2022 2:10 pm

piotr wrote:Yeah, I fully agree with you. What happens is that Brazilian Portuguese is well-standarised as a stand-alone dialect. For ideological reasons the Spanish Language never had so much luck as Portuguese in this regard and has always been treated as "just one language" even after the independence of given countries... Also, Brazil is also just one huge country and not subdivided into 10 or more middle-sized countries, so you have little dilemma which variant should be taught. It's more easy to produce materials for Brazilian Portuguese--there's no such thing as "Latin American Spanish" as each country has "its own Spanish but rather poorly-regulated".


Your explanation is spot-on. Whereas spanish is, for good or for bad, centralized by the RAE (Real Academia Española), we in Brazil see ourselves, since a long time, as a son who, in certain ways, "surpassed his father" (Portugal), so we would never accept to get back to the times when we submitted to any portuguese rules. Of course, one could argue that Portugal is a superior country in several aspects (and I see the point and would not argue back), but my point is just that there's a strong pride element here.

In the same vein, portuguese people are also very proud of their culture (and justly so). In short, differently from spanish (and not denying that the regional variants of latin american spanish are, in real life, quite diverse), the portuguese language has, at least, two accepted "centers" (I can't speak about the african countries who speak portuguese).

Now, if I wanted to really split hairs, I should mention that Brazil is a continental country and, just as we can find in Hispanic America, here we have a plethora of "dialects" underneath. We just don't call them dialects, as, for cultural/social/political reasons, we usually enjoy to perceive ourselves as one unified people and follow, more or less, the linguistic patterns dictated by our BBC equivalents. But with another mindset, perhaps we could easily end up dismembering our language in some others.
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Re: Question for Portuguese learners (code-switching?)

Postby piotr » Sun Dec 25, 2022 2:50 am

Diomedes wrote:Your explanation is spot-on. Whereas spanish is, for good or for bad, centralized by the RAE (Real Academia Española), we in Brazil see ourselves, since a long time, as a son who, in certain ways, "surpassed his father" (Portugal), so we would never accept to get back to the times when we submitted to any portuguese rules. Of course, one could argue that Portugal is a superior country in several aspects (and I see the point and would not argue back), but my point is just that there's a strong pride element here.

Which doesn't mean that Spanish speakers in the Americas feel inferior to Spain... ;) I'd say that the RAE is in many aspects like the Church: (a) ideology has always been in the first place (rather than comparative linguistics or anything else), (b) believers love it and non-believers hate it but no matter what we think about the RAE, it's too strong as an institution to really fight it.

Diomedes wrote:In the same vein, portuguese people are also very proud of their culture (and justly so). In short, differently from spanish (and not denying that the regional variants of latin american spanish are, in real life, quite diverse), the portuguese language has, at least, two accepted "centers" (I can't speak about the african countries who speak portuguese).

This is the strength of the Portuguese Language. Talking about the "centres" in the Spanish Language, it's much more complicated:

(1) One can argue that the "institutional centre" is de facto Spain, although individual countries de iure have their own academies, such as e.g., Academia Colombiana de la Lengua. This is a perfectly valid viewpoint.

(2) Other can see several principal "real life centres" in form of the largest or best developed countries e.g., Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina. This is also true.

(3) Others would say there is also some kind of a "linguistic or dialectal centre", which is essentially Colombia--Spanish dialects form a dialectal continuum, which means that Spanish variants spoken in neighbouring countries tend to be quite similar, whereas distant dialects tend to differ pretty much. Now, if we're looking for the most "neutral" kind of Spanish or -as I'd rather should say- the most equidistant kind of Spanish, we will naturally find it in the central region of this dialectal continuum, which is Colombia and its neighbouring countries (Panama, Venezuela, Ecuador; perhaps Peru or this is what many Peruvians believe).

The point (3) can be supported by the comparative linguistics (and this is in fact one of the numerous reasons why I've chosen Colombian Spanish). But in practice, some kind of a modified Mexican rather than Colombian Spanish is used a basis for "neutral Spanish" or "Latin American Spanish" e.g. for movie dubbing. I suppose that it's caused by the facts that (a) Mexico is the most populous country and (b) in this dialectal continuum the speech of Mexico, located in the North, in its most standard form is not very distant from the Spanish of Spain.

Diomedes wrote:Now, if I wanted to really split hairs, I should mention that Brazil is a continental country and, just as we can find in Hispanic America, here we have a plethora of "dialects" underneath. We just don't call them dialects, as, for cultural/social/political reasons, we usually enjoy to perceive ourselves as one unified people and follow, more or less, the linguistic patterns dictated by our BBC equivalents. But with another mindset, perhaps we could easily end up dismembering our language in some others.

Your comment is EXTREMELY interesting. :shock: And paradoxically, the dialectal diversity within the Brazilian Portuguese is one of the reasons why I say Brazilian Portuguese is not as distant from the Portuguese of Portugal as most beginner learners think. Let me explain...

If we compare European Portuguese with Brazilian Portuguese, and we also compare European Spanish with, say, Colombian Spanish in their very standard forms as taught in classical learning materials, one can conclude that the variants of Portuguese differ more. This is essentially what @Ug_Caveman suggested in his first post...

BUT... I have a learning book for Brazilian Portuguese (in Polish). According to my Brazilian Portuguese book, the second person pronoun is "você". The book completely IGNORES the fact that in many areas of Brazil, particularly in the North, the predominant form is "tu", which -depending on the region- can be associated by a você-like or a tu-like verbal conjugation. In other words, millions of people in Brazil use "tu" a similar way -and locally even the exact same way- as European Portuguese does. True? ;) But this is considered "non-standard" and ignored by learning materials for Brazilian Portuguese... There are regions in Brazil in which the pronunciation in certain aspects resembles that typical of Portugal and there are regions in Portugal where certain aspects of pronunciation look "Brazilian". True? ;)

Conclusions:

(1) Yes, learning the basics of the European Portuguese can probably be helpful while studying the Brazilian Portuguese. Because the "real life" Brazilian is diversified, can be pronounced lots of ways, etc, etc. Knowing more will never hurt you. ;)

(2) The differences are possibly greater than those found in Spanish if we talk about the very standard forms, which is caused by institutional, political or ideological reasons explained in the posts above. But if we talk about a real life language, I'm personally not really that sure: Spaniards and Portuguese people colonised South America just the same time... ;) In both cases, these are five hundred years of evolution and the Spanish Language is in fact well-diversified but there's a different approach to standarisation.
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Re: Question for Portuguese learners (code-switching?)

Postby Diomedes » Sun Dec 25, 2022 4:09 pm

It seems that we strongly agree about a lot of issues, but still not about the original OP question. So I will let the divergence to the end of my post.

piotr wrote:Which doesn't mean that Spanish speakers in the Americas feel inferior to Spain... ;) I'd say that the RAE is in many aspects like the Church: (a) ideology has always been in the first place (rather than comparative linguistics or anything else), (b) believers love it and non-believers hate it but no matter what we think about the RAE, it's too strong as an institution to really fight it.[/b].


Great analogy!

piotr wrote: This is the strength of the Portuguese Language. Talking about the "centres" in the Spanish Language, it's much more complicated:

(1) One can argue that the "institutional centre" is de facto Spain, although individual countries de iure have their own academies, such as e.g., Academia Colombiana de la Lengua. This is a perfectly valid viewpoint.

(2) Other can see several principal "real life centres" in form of the largest or best developed countries e.g., Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina. This is also true.

(3) Others would say there is also some kind of a "linguistic or dialectal centre", which is essentially Colombia--Spanish dialects form a dialectal continuum, which means that Spanish variants spoken in neighbouring countries tend to be quite similar, whereas distant dialects tend to differ pretty much. Now, if we're looking for the most "neutral" kind of Spanish or -as I'd rather should say- the most equidistant kind of Spanish, we will naturally find it in the central region of this dialectal continuum, which is Colombia and its neighbouring countries (Panama, Venezuela, Ecuador; perhaps Peru or this is what many Peruvians believe).

The point (3) can be supported by the comparative linguistics (and this is in fact one of the numerous reasons why I've chosen Colombian Spanish). But in practice, some kind of a modified Mexican rather than Colombian Spanish is used a basis for "neutral Spanish" or "Latin American Spanish" e.g. for movie dubbing. I suppose that it's caused by the facts that (a) Mexico is the most populous country and (b) in this dialectal continuum the speech of Mexico, located in the North, in its most standard form is not very distant from the Spanish of Spain.
[/b].


I once came to the same conclusion, which is, that I should learn Colombian Spanish because it is kind of a middle ground. The problem is: I could not find Colombian Spanish courses (or Argentinian Spanish, or Peruvian Spanish, etc.), and the generic "Latin American Spanish" sounded to much Mexican to me at that time, which was too culturally distant of my interests back then. That's one of the reasons I ended up learning through Iberian Spanish materials. I just ignore the "ceceo", like andalusians also do, and it seems to work generally well. But I still deplore the abscence of enough materials to properly learn the amazing variants and cultures of Hispanic America...

piotr wrote: Your comment is EXTREMELY interesting. :shock: And paradoxically, the dialectal diversity within the Brazilian Portuguese is one of the reasons why I say Brazilian Portuguese is not as distant from the Portuguese of Portugal as most beginner learners think. Let me explain...

If we compare European Portuguese with Brazilian Portuguese, and we also compare European Spanish with, say, Colombian Spanish in their very standard forms as taught in classical learning materials, one can conclude that the variants of Portuguese differ more. This is essentially what @Ug_Caveman suggested in his first post...

BUT... I have a learning book for Brazilian Portuguese (in Polish). According to my Brazilian Portuguese book, the second person pronoun is "você". The book completely IGNORES the fact that in many areas of Brazil, particularly in the North, the predominant form is "tu", which -depending on the region- can be associated by a você-like or a tu-like verbal conjugation. In other words, millions of people in Brazil use "tu" a similar way -and locally even the exact same way- as European Portuguese does. True? ;) But this is considered "non-standard" and ignored by learning materials for Brazilian Portuguese... There are regions in Brazil in which the pronunciation in certain aspects resembles that typical of Portugal and there are regions in Portugal where certain aspects of pronunciation look "Brazilian". True? ;) [/b].


Your remark is very clever, although a bit incomplete (and it's not your fault).

Brazil has 27 states (if we count the Federal District, which contains only our capital, Brasília as a state).

Among those states, only 3 of the most populated states (São Paulo, Paraná and Minas Gerais) use "você" all the time. There also another 3 (Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Espírito Santo).

In Rio de Janeiro, it's very fluid, and I wouldn't dare to try to explain how it works. I have relatives there and still struggle to understand! In short, they use both.

There are some very specific places in the north (São Luís, Belém) that use "tu" just like the portuguese, with the verb conjugated also in the second person ("tu foste"). I supposed that's what you noticed...

But in the other places in which "tu" prevails, and notoriously in the two most southern states (in which I live and was born), we use it in a very different way: with the verb conjugated in the THIRD person ("tu foi"), or with the verb conjugated in the second person, but in the subjuntive, not infinitive ("tu fosse", e não "tu foste" like in Portugal).

And even in places in which "tu" prevails, some linguists recently noticed a tendency of using "você", perhaps because of the news broadcasting and some soap operas, that come (guess what) from Rio and São Paulo!

Even these “rules” are not absolute. I’m just trying to give a fuller picture.

And in this fuller picture, the differences between European and Brazilian Portuguese are much, much extensive than just the use of “tu” or “você”. This is just a drop in the ocean.

Regarding the pronunciation, yes, you’re right, there are strong similarities here and there, but they surely don’t eliminate the stronger differences that really hinder the mutual comprehension. For example: the portuguese voraciously “eat” their vowels in a way that no brazilian does, even in the places that better preserved the lusitan pronunciation. On the contrary, we brazilians, to the portuguese ears, pronounce the vowels way too much! Even adding some that don't show in written language... There is arguably some vowel supression, for instance, in the “mineirês”(Minas Gerais), but they do it in a style totally different from Portugal, that would be uninteligible in Europe (and, frequently, in Brazil)...

piotr wrote:Conclusions:

(1) Yes, learning the basics of the European Portuguese can probably be helpful while studying the Brazilian Portuguese. Because the "real life" Brazilian is diversified, can be pronounced lots of ways, etc, etc. Knowing more will never hurt you. ;)

(2) The differences are possibly greater than those found in Spanish if we talk about the very standard forms, which is caused by institutional, political or ideological reasons explained in the posts above. But if we talk about a real life language, I'm personally not really that sure: Spaniards and Portuguese people colonised South America just the same time... ;) In both cases, these are five hundred years of evolution and the Spanish Language is in fact well-diversified but there's a different approach to standarisation.


Your conclusion (1) is the only point I cannot fully agree.

I understand what you mean when you say that iberian portuguese materials could be helpful to teach the “basics”. The problem I see in this kind of statement is that the concept of “basics” is very subjective. And, in this particular case, some “basics” of iberian portuguese perfectly match with their brazilian counterparts, but some others are different enough to confound the learner and/or make him sound quite weird to brazilians ears. In this learning method, finding out what was learned “wrong” can lead to an unnecessary process of trial and error. So, unless this learner feels a strong urge to delve into iberian portuguese just out of curiosity (and aware of the risks involved), I see no logical reason at all to do it when his focus is brazilian portuguese: if there are plenty of native materials available, why not to go straight for the real thing and avoid disorientation?
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Re: Question for Portuguese learners (code-switching?)

Postby piotr » Sun Dec 25, 2022 5:50 pm

Diomedes wrote:I once came to the same conclusion, which is, that I should learn Colombian Spanish because it is kind of a middle ground. The problem is: I could not find Colombian Spanish courses (or Argentinian Spanish, or Peruvian Spanish, etc.), and the generic "Latin American Spanish" sounded to much Mexican to me at that time, which was too culturally distant of my interests back then. That's one of the reasons I ended up learning through Iberian Spanish materials. I just ignore the "ceceo", like andalusians also do, and it seems to work generally well. But I still deplore the abscence of enough materials to properly learn the amazing variants and cultures of Hispanic America...

There are no learning materials for Colombian Spanish I know about and indeed this may look like a problem for many learners. I personally never in my life used a single learning book or a course of another kind studying Spanish. In the very beginning, 15 years ago I took Shakira's early songs' lyrics, and other texts in Spanish, without understanding a word, and translated them word by word with a dictionary... If you can speak Iberian Spanish, I think all you need to teach yourself Colombian is to read Colombian books, watch Colombian series, talk to lots of Colombians, etc. There are several dictionaries of Colombia-specific vocabulary I can recommend if anyone is interested... But that should be placed in another thread. 8-)

Diomedes wrote:Your remark is very clever, although a bit incomplete (and it's not your fault).

Brazil has 27 states (if we count the Federal District, which contains only our capital, Brasília as a state).

Among those states, only 3 of the most populated states (São Paulo, Paraná and Minas Gerais) use "você" all the time. There also another 3 (Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Espírito Santo).

In Rio de Janeiro, it's very fluid, and I wouldn't dare to try to explain how it works. I have relatives there and still struggle to understand! In short, they use both.

There are some very specific places in the north (São Luís, Belém) that use "tu" just like the portuguese, with the verb conjugated also in the second person ("tu foste"). I supposed that's what you noticed...

But in the other places in which "tu" prevails, and notoriously in the two most southern states (in which I live and was born), we use it in a very different way: with the verb conjugated in the THIRD person ("tu foi"), or with the verb conjugated in the second person, but in the subjuntive, not infinitive ("tu fosse", e não "tu foste" like in Portugal).

And even in places in which "tu" prevails, some linguists recently noticed a tendency of using "você", perhaps because of the news broadcasting and some soap operas, that come (guess what) from Rio and São Paulo!

Even these “rules” are not absolute. I’m just trying to give a fuller picture.

And in this fuller picture, the differences between European and Brazilian Portuguese are much, much extensive than just the use of “tu” or “você”. This is just a drop in the ocean.

Regarding the pronunciation, yes, you’re right, there are strong similarities here and there, but they surely don’t eliminate the stronger differences that really hinder the mutual comprehension. For example: the portuguese voraciously “eat” their vowels in a way that no brazilian does, even in the places that better preserved the lusitan pronunciation. On the contrary, we brazilians, to the portuguese ears, pronounce the vowels way too much! Even adding some that don't show in written language... There is arguably some vowel supression, for instance, in the “mineirês”(Minas Gerais), but they do it in a style totally different from Portugal, that would be uninteligible in Europe (and, frequently, in Brazil)...

Of course, I took the second person pronoun as a simple example and this is just a drop in the ocean. Also, thanks for a more detailed info... :D But, please, look at the map titled "The status of second person pronouns in Brazil" in Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_language
According to this map the Amazonas State predominantly uses "tu" but with a near exclusive third person (você-like) verbal conjugation... I'm actually going to visit this Brazilian state in 2023, so this is the region of Brazil I'm most interested in for now. I'm studying the Tikuna Language (of course, without the use of learning books which simply do not exist with one rather unusable exception). And as for now, most of the Portuguese of the Amazonas State I've heard was from Tikuna bilinguals in Tikuna and Portuguese. I don't known how fluent in Portuguese they truly are... Spanish skills of the Tikunas in Colombia vary from person to person--some speak a perfect Amazonian Colombian and some sound rather odd talking in Spanish.

Diomedes wrote:I understand what you mean when you say that iberian portuguese materials could be helpful to teach the “basics”. The problem I see in this kind of statement is that the concept of “basics” is very subjective. And, in this particular case, some “basics” of iberian portuguese perfectly match with their brazilian counterparts, but some others are different enough to confound the learner and/or make him sound quite weird to brazilians ears. In this learning method, finding out what was learned “wrong” can lead to an unnecessary process of trial and error. So, unless this learner feels a strong urge to delve into iberian portuguese just out of curiosity (and aware of the risks involved), I see no logical reason at all to do it when his focus is brazilian portuguese: if there are plenty of native materials available, why not to go straight for the real thing and avoid disorientation?

Well, I don't know... I assume that studying a language is a long process of many years of a hard work--I don't think that taking a brief course (A2) of the other variant for a month or so would confound a person who the most of the time has a near-exclusive contact with the Portuguese of Brazil.

I can't really actively speak Portuguese... But I speak a purely Colombian variant of Spanish and I never felt confounded reading about other variants of Spanish. On the contrary, I'd say it helped me to better define what the characteristics of "my own" Colombian variant of Spanish are and what are not.

But I don't suggest that studying the basics of the Portuguese of Portugal is really necessary in order to master Brazilian. That would in fact sound rather weird... ;)
1 x
Language converter for English, Latin, Polish, Quechua, Spanish, and Tikuna:
https://github.com/piotrbajdek/lngcnv :D


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