• Prove_your_argument@piefed.social
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    6 days ago

    There’s a lot of similarities between Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish. Most Portuguese speaking people can understand basic Spanish but it’s harder for Spanish speaking people to understand Portuguese.

    At least that’s what my wife tells me as a Spanish native ~150 days into learning Portuguese.

    • wander1236@sh.itjust.works
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      6 days ago

      IMO (formal) American Portuguese and Spanish are pretty close to mutually intelligible, especially in writing. There’s a surprisingly consistent “system” for converting words between them and once you notice it, it’s pretty easy to tell what a sentence should be in the other language, if it’s even spelled differently in the first place. The grammar is also very similar. The biggest difference that gets me is how Portuguese tends to shift past tense conjugations further into the past vs Spanish.

    • 0x0@lemmy.zip
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      6 days ago

      Because Portuguese has many more vowels than Spanish and there are a lot of false friends between the two.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
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        6 days ago

        To me, it sounds like Brazilian Portuguese (dunno about European Portuguese) has a ridiculous number of diphthongs.

        • furry toaster@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          6 days ago

          portguese brazillian has a ridiculous number of diphtongs? havr you seen english? it could be my bias as a native speaker but I don’t really see many diphtongs in brazillian portuguese

          • merc@sh.itjust.works
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            5 days ago

            Which English diphthongs are you talking about?

            There’s the /ɔɪ/ in “choice”, and /aʊ/ in “mouth”.

            There’s /aɪ/ in “light”.

            Sometimes you hear a distinct /ʊ/ in “slow”, but again meaning there’s an /oʊ/ diphthong. But, if you dropped that sound and just pronounced it /o/, I think nobody would notice. I think you could argue that many dialects of English do that already.

            There’s also a claim that /eɪ/ is heard in words like “play”, and I can maybe see that, but there’s also a claim that it’s how you pronounce “face”, and everyone I know just uses /e/.

            There’s /juː/ as used in words like “music”. But, many of the words where that one was once used just use a /uː/ like “student” or “tune”.

            So, that’s only /juː/, /ɔɪ/, /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ where the word sounds completely wrong if you don’t use the diphthong, and a number of other cases where some dialiects use a diphthong, or some people claim to hear a diphthong.

            Meanwhiile in Portuguese you have:

            • /aj/ - pai
            • /ɐj/ - leite
            • /ej/ - rei
            • /oj/ - dois
            • /uj/ - fui
            • /aw/ - mau / mal
            • /ɐw/ - saudade
            • /ew/ - seu
            • /iw/ - viu

            And then add to that all the nasal diphthongs like mão or não. There are a lot of other weird things going on with Portuguese, but really the only English dialect(s) with a similar amount of vowel sounds is Aussie / Kiwi English.