Backstory:
My SO’s job in our relationship is to travel a lot and accrue frequent flyer miles. My job in our relationship is to learn the language before we head to a new place. This system usually works out well, I’ve always been pretty adept at learning enough to order food, get directions, have light conversation, etc.
In college I majored in German and am still fairly fluent in reading and speaking. However, when we go to the Netherlands, I have a hard time learning Dutch beforehand. It’s just too similar to German. I feel like I can read it and for the most part totally understand the meaning. Currently:
Now, we’re heading to Rio de Janeiro for a week in October and while my Spanish is up to snuff, I’m worried that I’m going to hit that block where Portuguese won’t stick.
Doing a cursory look at Portuguese, the words look similar enough that I feel like I can understand what’s being written as the cognates are (or seem) strong. The pronunciation does not seem as straightforward though.
So any ideas on not making a complete ass out of myself? (And no, not learning the language isn’t an option.)
I’d be interested in knowing how hard it is to get by with Spanish in Rio. In such a large metropolitan area, how bilingual are most of the people a traveller is going to encounter?
I’m fluent in Spanish, and traveled in Brazil about five years ago, including Rio. Before going I studied Portuguese grammar and listened to language tapes. I had previously listened to lectures in Portuguese at international conferences, and found that it wasn’t difficult to get the gist. I also find it fairly easy to read Portuguese.
Given this, I found it surprisingly difficult to understand spoken Portuguese in the street - nearly impossible, in fact. While the words are similar, the pronunciation is quite different. Vowels are much more fluid, and consonants sound slurred. Portuguese is typically much more musical, that is, spoken with rising and falling inflections. (One video compares Portuguese to drunken Spanish. I think of it as Spanish spoken with an Italian accent.)
I didn’t find that many Spanish speakers in Brazil. (People were more likely to switch to English than Spanish.) However, in a pinch when I didn’t know a word or phrase I could often fall back on my Spanish and be understood.
Correction: Brazilian is musical, Portuguese is gutteral. It’s often difficult for continental Portuguese folks to understand Brazilian speakers. I was trained by Brazilians and had a terrible time understanding the folks in Lisbon.
As someone with a very high MLAT, and a background in Latin and Spanish, I had a somewhat difficult time with Portuguese. As mentioned, although the cognates are pretty much the same, the language is just different enough to where a Spanish speaker will likely revert to that language when he comes to not being able to recall the Portuguese word for something. I always likened Portuguese as Spanish without all those pesky vowels and such, i.e., bom instead of bueno, bem instead of bien. That’s not quite accurate of course, but serves the purpose. And then there is the shwush of the esses and the soft ‘D’ and ‘T’, which are pronounced like an English ‘J’ and ‘ch’, respectively, and the swallowed consonants. Spaghetti becomes spagechi (although it’s spelled ‘spageti’), and ‘bom dia’ is ‘bo(ng) gee-ah’.
I got tremendously confused when I asked where I could charge money on a credit card and was told I could do it at “Secchibanqui” on the next block. I walked up and down for quite a while and asked several other people before I realized that I was looking for a Citibank.
The pronunciation is equally straightforward, but the relationships are different ones; keep in mind that very often, and this is true of Spanish as well, the relationship isn’t at the letter level but at the syllable level.
Ex: Spanish brasileño ends in /ŋo/ - so does Portuguese brasilenho. Spanish uses a letter, Portuguese a digraph.
Another from Spanish: g is either /x/ or /g/ - to see which one, you need to look at the vowel(s) behind it.
If you’re familiar with IPA, search for “brasilenho alfabeto fonetico internacional”: it brings up a ton of sites and videos, focusing on Brazil-specific pronunciations (some provide comparisons with the Portuguese versions). Wiki helpfully provides a Porto-Brazilo-Galego-English pronunciation guide (IME those wiki tables tend to provide more information than most non-linguists will ever really need).
Many people will have Spanish as a second language; I’ve communicated in Brazinhol with people with whom we didn’t have a common language (training for their job - I wanted to teach, they wanted to learn, their boss was overwhelmed), but in other cases I ended having to look at the display on the PoS terminal. I still think it’s nice of you to learn some basic lines, but you may find that when your Portuguese isn’t good enough, Spanish will work better than English not just due to the similarities but because many people have actually studied Spanish.
As a native Spanish speaker I found learning Brazilian Portuguese trivial after a couple classes to get the pronunciation down. The most helpful thing after that was keeping Red Globo on most of the day on TV.
This isn’t what I’ve experienced. I have a lot of family in Brazil, and was there earlier this year. My folks used to live in Rio and I would say it is fairly rare for a Brazilian to have studied Spanish. The folks with the means to have studied a foreign language will almost always have studied English. (This may be different in the border states, but Rio won’t be one of them). I have Spanish speaking family, who’ve gone to Brazil, and people have understood them, but in turn, the Spanish speakers have had more trouble. Brazilians generally will try to help you and the folks at most stores will go out of their way to try to understand what you are saying.
I’m not sure how widespread it is, but when colleagues from Camaçari would visit us in Mexico City, they were quite capable at “Portuñol” (I think that’s the term they used). I’m a fluent non-native speaker, but between the Mexicans, me, and the Brazilians the only real difficulties were oddly specific things, and food.
When listening to Portugal-Portuguese, I can kind of get it. I can’t understand a single spoken word of Brazilian, though.
Reading is interesting. The cognates are strong enough that I can understand a lot of written Portuguese, to the extent that I would use them for movie subtitles when I couldn’t find an appropriate Spanish version. My native-speaker ex-wife, though, said they were useless to her.
The lingua franca of Angola is European Portuguese. It is taught in schools and used by the business community and the government. I never took Spanish in school but when when I travel to Houston I can usually follow conversations in Spanish. As with many languages, there are “slang” words that might trip you up. Based on my two trips to Rio, the Brazilian Portuguese is similar enough for me to communicate get around.
Interestingly enough, partners from ENI ( national O&G company of Italy ) have told me that they found Portuguese and Italian pretty similar.
