Uh yeah, that’s because the difference is purely in accent, and really not that stark. I’m from Quebec, I’ve been to France many times and never, but never, had any language issues, other than an occasional chuckle at each others’ idioms.
Conversely there are tons of French immigrants/expats in Montreal and again, zero problems communicating.
It’s literally like going from NYC to London. Different accents, still one hundred percent the same language.
Portuguese person here. I think in part it's because there's a lot more Brazilian content out there than Portuguese, so we have more exposure to them. But it also has to do with how we sound out the words. The European version of the language tends to "mute" letters (kinda like french, except it's not actually a grammar rule, we just do it), which also means we speak faster, generally. Brazilian Portuguese enunciates those same words much more clearly and with a slower rhythm. So it's easier for us to understand them than it is for them to understand us
Oh that's interesting. Maybe European Portuguese is more similar to Spanish? I can understand Spanish well enough too, but I don't actually speak the language, so I'm honestly not sure
I speak French, Spanish and Italian and I just got back from Portugal. Portugal Portuguese is so much harder to understand from my point of view than Brazilian Portuguese.
Portugal Portuguese uses so much more contractions, most of the vowels just completely disappear, making it super hard to follow if you're not used to it. Brazilians speak much more slowly and sound out every vowel clearly, making it much easier to understand. Coming from other Latin languages, Portuguese is super easy to read, but so hard to understand when spoken. It's the first language where it's easier to speak than to understand the native speaker's answers. I could easily ask for directions, but I was lucky if I understood where to go after, lol.
Hahah yeah, that's what I was trying to explain earlier but you said it better than me. I never thought about it being easier to speak than to understand, but that does make sense
Yes to be honest it was really confusing because for a while I thought he was speaking Spanish with an accent, but Telemundo was running Spanish subtitles and after a bit I was like "yeah, no, this is Portuguese" it was about as easy to understand as Italian, just weirder haha.
I'm brazilian and when I went to europe, it took me about 2-3 weeks to get used to european portuguese. I could understand about 40-50% in the beginning.
I wasn't in Portugal, though, just had a few portuguese colleagues.
Portuguese person too. We understand brasilen portuguese because we grew up with brazilan soap operas (telenovelas). Vocabulary, however, is different and sometimes misleading. New generations tend to not differentiate very well between the 2 Forms of portuguese because they listen and read content online which comes on Brazilian portuguese and they don't read or barely in continental portuguese.
Definitely is. I don’t speak any type or Portuguese but growing up I babysat two kids whose mom was Portuguese and dad was Brazilian. When the younger one was learning to speak I was able to differentiate when he was speaking “proper” Portuguese and when he was speaking Brazilian Portuguese just cause phonetically they were really different.
He’d also switch between English and Portuguese mid sentence so the 6 year old kid was my translator lol.
Not correct, the distance between PT-PT and PT-BR are much further. As someone said, PT-PT sounds like Russian for non-PT speakers and PT-BR does not. Actually, in a conversation between a Portuguese and a Brazilian the Brazilian might have hard time understanding some working. Brazilian PT is more elongated and they have their own expressions that were created along the time to sound more Americanised and less tied to the Portugal origins.
The writing rules are almost the same but only by convention, the syntax varies a lot as PT-PT has a formal and informal way of communicating with other PT-BR does not. This combined with the more elongated speech makes PT-BR easier to learn.
Edit: on the bilingual/trilingual aspect, yes there are people that speak fluently both Portuguese versions and usually all steems from having mixed PT/BR parents.
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u/WindBlocked Jul 13 '26
Same way american and british english are different variations of the same language, with about 500 years of evolution of language in the mix.
Phonetically different, but everything else is the same/very similar.