Hello!
I am a teacher for European Portuguese and I wrote an article about the differences between Brazilian and European Portuguese.
I focus mainly on Pronunciation, Grammar and some vocabulary.
You can check out the article on my website:
It is hard to say which one you should learn. I think it depends on why you are learning the language. Are you going to visit Portugal or Brazil, or are you maybe even planning to move there for a longer period?
Cheers,
Mia.
If I go to Portugal and speak to them in the Brazilian accent, would they understand me very well?
Hello =)
Yes, in fact everyone in Portugal can understand the Brazilian accent without any problem. We are used to listen to Brazilian music and to watch Brazilian soap operas among other things which makes it easier. Besides this, Brazilian Portuguese seems to have more open sounds in comparison to European Portuguese and that makes it also easier to understand.
If you want to check out the difference in sound, you can check out a post I wrote about the European Portuguese pronunciation. There are also audio examples included =)
Here you go… Portuguese Pronunciation | Complete Guide
Hope this helps!
Regards,
Mia.
Hi Mia. What about brazilian slangs? can you guys understand them?
The accent is quite different, portugal is more “close”, looks like more polite and they use very well tha grammar. Brazil is the easily one to learn… we do not care so much about the grammar… we talk more friendly, “less polite”. YOU SHOULD LEARN PORTUGUESE FROM BRAZIL.
You talk as if not using the correct grammar is a good thing.
Guys, sorry but there’s no sense in saying Brazilians don’t care about grammar. Every language variety has its own grammar, even if it works unconsciously and if that grammar doesn’t correspond to the grammar of the standard variety. Our problem is we have an alien grammar model based on XIX century variety of Portuguese.
Let’s take the case of our pronouns as an example: theoretically it’s wrong to begin a phrase with a pronoun in its object form. Thanks to that, it’s considered grammarly wrong to say “Me passe o copo, por favor” (“Pass me the glass, please”), even if almost every Brazilian speaker uses this kind of construction instead of the incredible artificial “Passe-me o copo, por favor”.
This kind of problem is so old that we have satirical modernist poems by the beginning of the XX century making fun of these subject (100 years ago!). For example, the famous:
Pronominais, de Oswald de Andrade
“Dê-me um cigarro”
Diz a gramática
Do professor e do aluno
E do mulato sabido
Mas o bom negro e o bom branco
Da Nação Brasileira
Dizem todos os dias
“Deixa disso camarada
Me dá um cigarro.”
(It’s impossible to translate the joke, so I would use an imaginary English construction to illustrate it
Pronominal, by Oswald de Andrade
“Give me a cigarette”
Says the grammar
Of the teacher and of the student
and of the smart mulatto
But the good black and the good white
Of Brazilian nation
Say everyday:
“It doesn’t matter, my friend
Me give a cigarette”
I know, the last phrase doesn’t exist in English, but that’s the way almost all Brazilians use this pronoun)
So we have a very simple rule in this case: of course you can use an object pronoun at the beginning of a phrase. There’s no reason to forbid it, since there’s no Brazilian Portuguese variety in which this is not valid, but that’s exactly what happens in our country. We teach a formal model of language that simply doesn’t exist in reality -not even between educated people.
The funny thing is that instead of criticize this model, we created a myth that Brazilians don’t know how to speak their own language, which is quite absurd since every human being knows perfectly well his mother tongue because that’s the whole concept of having a mother tongue.
I strongly recommend you both to search for books like
Sounds kind of like, “Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I shall not put.”
Hi Lucas! =)
It depends… Some slang we learn also from watching Brazilian soap operas, but for sure there are slang words and expressions we don´t understand. Brazil is such a big country; for sure there are a lot of slangs that are typical of certain regions and maybe even Brazilian people from other regions won´t get.
Best regards,
Mia.
“there are a lot of slangs that are typical of certain regions and maybe even Brazilian people from other regions won´t get.”
You’re completely right! And, to tell you the truth, sometimes I don’t get not just the slang part but the whole speech.
“so much”.We are leaning on Lingq… of course is better… would you like a Portuguese saying that you are not right because the correct is “Tu és” (You had said like north accent, “Tu é”)?
The first one, can you point me where I wrote that Brazilians do not care about grammar? I told “So much”, coz Brazil is a giant country! did you travel to North or Northeast? (if you did) you gonna see the “Amazonian Portuguese” or the beautiful one “Portuguese from maranhão”.
Sum up YES! we do not care SO MUCH about grammar, coz Brazil are giant and not just South and southeast.
you cannot compare PT-BR with a PT-PT where have only 11 millions of people living in a little(and lovely) country.