Luso wrote:I loved HTLAL, but it had some recurring prejudices. One was exaggerating the differences between the regional variants of Portuguese. Whenever you asked the natives (like me and a few Brazilians) everyone would dispel this notion. Differences? yes. Difficulties understanding each other? not really. Some advanced learners, like my friend Iguanamon, would also minimise it. Then the misconception would creep up again.
Ok, but you have to consider that this also depends on the learner. For people who, like me, find decoding speech the hardest part of learning a language, I wouldn't minimize the difficulty of learning two varieties that mostly differ in pronunciation.
I would certainly choose to learn European Portuguese, because I strongly suspect that if I learned Brazilian one, it would not allow me to easily understand European Portuguese speech.
For the record, I often struggle understanding speech in my native language too.