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Portuguese is very rich in terms of phonemes compared to other western languages. Brazil is a very big country with many different accents, but when we talk abo
by marcodiego 5y ago
Portuguese is very rich in terms of phonemes compared to other western languages. Brazil is a very big country with many different accents, but when we talk about popular artists and TV, there are some which are popular in the whole country. This makes the people well aware of how people from different parts of the country speak and, naturally, people have developed a "common way to speak" that can sound "neutral" to most people.
I've heard people calling this way to speak "fala de apresentador da Globo": which means "Globo's presenter way of speech"; Globo is Brazil's most popular TV network and its presenters have a clear way to speak that sounds very neutral and free from accents from one region or another.
I lived in Rondônia during the 90's. It was a very recent state and, at the time, people from all over the country went to live there to make good use of the new opportunities offered by a recent new state. So, the people living there were mostly from other places and there was a mix of accents which made it basically accent-free.
All forms of pronouncing "r" are very easy to me. And, to help people understand what I say and because I lived among very different accents, I speak in a very "neutral" way. People have once said I have a "fala de apresentador da Globo". But this way of speech is not uncommon in most developed regions neither among people who have to talk to people of different parts of the country.
Result of this: Brazilians can speak most of the romance languages and even other less phoneme rich languages from Asia or Europe without much difficulty. We even make fun of hispanophonic latin-americans because they can't say "cair no poço não posso".
- pelasaco 5y agoNormally Brazilians have issues with the german R as spoken in the North of Germany. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNU6ZLaZ7Z8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNU6ZLaZ7Z8
- marcodiego 5y agoIndeed, this 'r' sound where the vibration lies deep into the throat is not part of our phoneme repository. I have no difficulty with it though.
- jventura 5y agoIt’s just a regular “r” for us pt-pt natives... :)
- pelasaco 5y agoYes in Portugal, I tend to see a lot of similarities with German by the spoken Portuguese.. Like "Ei" sounding like "Ai" and "P" sounding like "B" in the beginning of sentences.
- ratww 5y agoI was really surprised at how close the alphabet letters are pronounced in German and Portuguese.
- pelasaco 5y agome too. I grew-up between Germany and Brazil and now I live mainly in Portugal. In the beginning I was amused by that too. Now I can really speak PT-PT. Even "Ja" can be used to say yes.
- chefandy 5y agoThough I don't speak Portuguese myself, my immediate family roots are Azorean and grew up among the huge Azorean population surrounding New Bedford and Fall River, so I've heard it regularly for my entire life. I lived a bit further north during High School and regularly encountered folks from Russia and the Ukraine. I thought I was crazy for thinking spoken pt-PT and Russian sounded similar from a distance. However, my best friend who grew up in St. Petersburg and has a degree in linguistics said he often does a double-take when hearing pt-PT speakers on the street! He had some sort of technical explanation for it (that didn't stick in my head being a non-linguist and (sadly) monolingual.)
- wenc 5y agoIt’s because Pt-Pt is a stressed timed language vs Br-Pt which is a syllable timed language. Pt-Pt drops a lot of unstressed vowels whereas Br-Pt almost all syllables are pronounced. Langfocus did a video on why (European) Português sounds like Russian. https://youtu.be/Pik2R46xobA https://youtu.be/Pik2R46xobA
- pportela 5y agoYup, I'm a brazilian living in northern germany, and one of the words I struggle with the most is "rechts". It's just really difficult to get that 'r' sound right.
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- ratww 5y ago"Rechts" also has the "ch" sound which is not as foreign per se to speak, but kind of deceptive and maybe too subtle to Portuguese speakers. I got the R quickly since it's more obvious, but for the ch it took me a bit longer to even notice the difference between my ch and the German ch.
- bkantt 5y agoSimilarly and for the same reasons, they have a lot of trouble combining the Spanish R with the Spanish G or J sound. Spanish words such as "jarra," "Jorge," or "rojo" tend to be very difficult even for Lusophones who are advanced Spanish speakers. But I agree that Portuguese is a lot more phonetically complex than most (if not all) Western European languages.
- yeahforsureman 5y agoHow well do you cope then with e.g. Germanic and Eastern European features (such as vowels ä, ö, ü/y, y/ы and schwa, difficult consonant clusters, and short/long vowels and consonants independent of stress)?
- simtel20 5y agoYou don't have to go that far afield. Most Brazilians have a tremendous challenge in saying "the" and will be taught to say "th" as "d" and often it's good enough to be understood, but far from natural sounding.
- yeahforsureman 5y agoTotally forgot the most obvious ones! I think "the" and "thing" are difficult to some degree for most non-English speakers. Actually, languages that have those both or something very close naturally are very rare. Only Icelandic comes to mind. And then peninsular Spanish, Galician, Albanian, Greek and many Arabic dialects have the "thing" at least. Of all the approximates people use for "the", the soft Latin "d" is quite close to the original, compared to, say, the Franco-German "ze"! Even here in Finland, we are quite fluent in English as such but many completely disregard the difference brought by the "h" in both phonemes, and just aspirate the "t" like you would do without the "h" (and then pronounce the other t's softly without aspiration at all!). It's all comprehensible as long as its regular, I guess. Still, as an elementary Spanish speaker, I still often get distracted by the Brazilian r's, since instead of "r", I hear the Spanish "jota" or otherwise something I would describe as in the range of h-like sounds, not r's.
- silasdb 5y agoAfter TV has became almost universal, there is indeed a unification of accents. I believe it also happens in other countries as well. For Brazil, I believe it is not "accent-free brazilian portuguese" popularized by the media, but rather accent from the southeast region, specially Rio-São Paulo (the most economically developed region) and totally excludes beautiful accents like northeast (Nordeste) and south (Sul) ones which rarely find a way on media with exception of local TV shows.
- andrepd 5y ago"BBC english" is also the name given to the rp "neutral" accent of British English.
- ilamont 5y agoRP = "Received Pronunciation" Mentioning this because the term is not widely known in the U.S., at least in my circles. https://www.bl.uk/british-accents-and-dialects/articles/received-pronunciation https://www.bl.uk/british-accents-and-dialects/articles/rece...
- bigodbiel 5y agoThis really reminds me of “tranatlantic accent” which prevailed in the mid 1900 and for many non-English speakers was considered as the de facto English, mainly because of it popularization via news and entertainment industries. Just like Hollywood and news broadcast, Brazilian soap operas have created the de facto Portuguese accent for non-Portuguese speakers.
- ilamont 5y agoI knew it as "mid-Atlantic" ... you sometimes hear it in old black and white Hollywood movies featuring upper crust East Coast Americans and media personalities like William F. Buckley. I believe FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt used it as well.
- xwolfi 5y agoAs a French what I find insane is that I can sorta read it (and I suppose Portuguese can decypher French too), but I do not get what they say at all. Italian, Spanish or Romanian I can, but Portuguese is like totally alien - I wonder how the pronunciation of Latin could derive so much from Italian.
- mlinhares 5y agoThis is really surprising, Portuguese is pretty close to Spanish (it is derived directly from Spanish) so other than the nasal vowels it tracks pretty close to it, it also has a considerable vocabulary of words that sound pretty close to their Italian counterparts. I've never heard an Italian or Spanish person say they can't understand anything in a spoken Portuguese conversation.
- salicideblock 5y agoPortuguese (at least the one from Portugal) has 9 vowel phonemes, compared to 5 for spanish. If you count the nasals it's 14. And you can add some additional vowel richness in diphthongs. It's very very varied phonetically when compared to the neighboring Spanish, which IIRC underwent considerable simplification at in the 16th century with unification of Spain. I've heard many French and Spanish native speakers expressing the difficulty to understand it. Source: Portuguese native speaker with decades-long immersion in Spanish and French-speaking communities.
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- pdpi 5y agoItalians and Spaniards should have an easy time understanding at least some Brazilian portuguese. European Portuguese is _really_ hard, though, because our vowels are all sorts of weird. When I moved to London, it really struck me how people speaking Russian sounded to me like they were speaking Portuguese, which always forced a double take when I tried to “tune in” and realised it wasn’t my own language.
- andrepd 5y agoEven Portugal, a small country of 10 million people / 100k km^2, has quite a lot of linguistic diversity.