Actually, cachorro means cub (like a bear cub), or even other infant animal like a puppy, in Spanish. Yes, the pronunciation is weird, but I suspect Nava learned Portuguese pronunciation rules — this would only take an hour or so.
Certainly, it’s easier to understand when written than when pronounced — and the scientific vocab in a lab will be more similar than everyday conversations.
ETA:Ninja’d!
Yeah, but we’re talking about two strangers meeting, that presumably wouldn’t have studied eachother’s language at all. Sure, after some time, not even a terribly long time, you’d get along okay. But not right off.
This is true. But the same could be said for Italian. The differences between Italian and Portuguese are more than Spanish and Portuguese, but all the romance language have some pretty marked similarities.
I disagree with this too. I’m not even a native Spanish speaker and I could do better than that.
Not “completely different,” no.
Okay, sure, take a stab at this video.
Right off, and all the study I’d done was, after a lot of effort, manage to extract the days of the week and a little bit more from managers who always wanted to practice their English with assistance in Spanish. I’ve forgotten most of it, but I’m currently working with two Portuguse people and the meetings “with everything in English” tend to switch to Spanish, Portuguese or Valenciano all the time; we don’t feel comfortable enough to just mix languages, but half the time it’s just easier to say whatever in our native languages than to fish for the English equivalent (fourth language for the other Spaniards).
Food is food is food, numbers aren’t so different (cafeteria workers); a lot of the lab, quality, color vocabulary I needed with the techs was different in the vowels but since I wanted to teach and they very much wanted to learn, it worked. Lots of vocabulary is the same: a kitasato is a kitasato is a kitasato, and Kitasato-San was Japanese.
[quote=“Ashtura, post:45, topic:816746”]
Okay, sure, take a stab at this video.
[/QUOTE]As I said, when I was in Brazil I found I could get the gist of lectures in Portuguese. I couldn’t follow conversations between Brazilians, but speaking one-on-one we could often communicate.
If your experience was different, I must conclude you are even worse at languages than I am, and I’m pretty bad.
My experience was not terribly different. I had 4 years of Spanish in high school and 6 months of immersion in Spanish before I ever knew a lick of Portuguese. I fully acknowledge that is a leg up over somebody that never spoke any romance language. I can understand Spanish reasonably well, not great, but decent. And I studied Portuguese 8 hours a day for two months before I stepped foot in Brazil. People were genuinely shocked at how much I knew. And then I spent additional two years speaking nothing but Portuguese.
When I spoke to Spanish speakers who knew nothing about Portuguese, in Portuguese, it did not go very far. Sure, if you think talking to someone like a two-year old, very slowly, in the simplest possible way, is sufficient (and it probably is amongst strangers in the World cup), then I agree. And that is what is happening when someone has almost no idea what’s going on between two natives, and then they turn to the non-native and suddenly they do. YMMV.
Never realized that about the Brazil/Portugal gulf. If I understand this thread correctly, it is far wider than the Castillian/South- or Latin- American gulf, which is mostly a matter of relatively penetrable accent and occasional vocabulary differences.
FTR, I (a NYC-er), had a hand-to-Og encounter with a couple from Edinborough asking for directions. Even after the third try–as I reposted in every European language I knew–when the husband got through to me he was speaking English, and I caught a few words, I still couldn’t understand what his wife was saying.
Extremely weird and unsettling, for some reason.
I think that being an American with the General American Accent (which is a regional accent, don’t let anyone convince you otherwise) - the accent of newscasters, movie actors, etc. - has helped me. Thanks to American cultural imperialism, rare is the English-speaker who wouldn’t be able to understand me.
Frostbit
In any of those cases, a lot may have to do with all parties’ ability to code-switch.
My Costa Rican team included, at different times, people from:
Navarre, Cantabria, Huelva, the Canary Islands, two guys from Madrid with very different “home” accents ahd Granada on the Spanish side.
Costa Rica (d’uh), Nicaragua, Venezuela, Argentina and Mexico, on the American side.
The three people in our side who had problems communicating were the two Andalusians (neither of whom could be understood by their own respective mothers over the phone, and one of whom has gone on to gain a country-wide reputation for incomprehensibility) and the “posh” dude from Madrid (whose Spanish was understandable, it was his mind that caused problems; dude had such a bad case of privilege, his privilege could have been its own country).
I just had a similar experience and reaction last week! A Scotsman was talking to another behind me in a line (queue), and it took me five minutes to realize he was speaking English — until then, I thought it was some foreign language (Frisian? Icelandic? I had no idea). Like with you, it gave me a very strange feeling.
I occasionally watch Portuguese soap operas online, and they tend to lose or elide ending letters. The word for friend might be “amigo”, but they pronounce it “amizh”. Though they usually say “pal” anyway.
Exactly right.
If I put enough effort into it, I can manage to misunderstand anyone.
Since I didn’t really know the pronunciation I just used google to hear it.
It’s very similar. the “ch” gets turned into a kind of “sh” and the “rr” almost sounds like a soft “g” but the word sounds very similar to the spanish “cachorro”.
I would liken Portuguese to Spanish as spoken by a drunken Italian. 
It does sound slurred in comparison.
As someone noted upthread, the Rio accent is quite different for many words, though. It seems like half their words end in “-gee” (as in English “golly gee!”).
Twice I have encountered people in London I could literally not understand at all at all. Oh scattered words but not a whole sentence. One was asking a porter in Victoria Station where the boat train to Paris was and after three tries, I gave up. I have visited Barbados many times and cannot understand the native version of English, although they can almost all make a reasonable approximation to it. I once met a highland Scot who spoke beautifully clear (although British) English until he demonstrated what his native dialect (of English, not Scots Gaelic) sounded like, which was utterly incomprehensible.
A Frenchman will not understand a Quebecois speaking his native Joual (“joual” is what the “cheval” has evolved to in the dialect). Of course, Quebecois will always understand standard French and can usually speak a decent approximation of it when needed.
So the question of whether a Brazilian and a Portuguese can communicate is not the same as whether they readily understand each other’s actual native dialect.
Once again, it’s a question of register. If a French person uses a very informal register (full of verlan), I won’t be able to make heads or tails of it. But if both the French person and the Quebecer use normal, informal but rather international French, there is no problem with understanding on either side.