How Similar Are Spanish & Portuguese Really?
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SOURCES & FURTHER READING
Spanish vs Portuguese: www.spanish.academy/blog/span...
Portuguese vs Spanish: www.portuguesepedia.com/portu...
Iberia’s Children: unravellingmag.com/articles/p...
I speak both Spanish and Portuguese and my main problem learning portuguese was that both languages are so similar, instead of being an advantage was an obstacle beacuse sometimes I ended up speaking "portuñol"
exatamente, quando eu estava aprendendo espanhol, várias vezes eu acabava falando português com sotaque espanhol achando que estava falando espanhol de verdade kkkkkkk
Portuñol should be our language and we should tear down our borders!
@@crisoliveira2644ideia interessante
@@djmhydeno se dice "portugués con acento español", se dice "gallego" 😂😂😂
@@LisandroLorea tienes razón jajaja
Spanish does NOT have three grammatical genders, only two: Masculine and femenine. It has exactly ONE neutral pronoun and its usage is very restricted to specifical grammar constructions. No nouns or adjectives belong to a Neutral gender, only, again, to masculine and femenine, just like in Portuguese
i swear this guy must be the laziest researcher 😂 his pronunciation is horrible too. like he doesn’t even try to pronounce vowel sounds correctly or stress his syllables as he’s indicating
Yeah, I don't know where he got that from. It seems he doesn't does his research very well
Yeah im not really sure what the implication was. Btw doesnt spanish have more than one neutral pronoun?
Tú, Vos, Usted, y Ustedes
@Alex-ii9sp While 2nd person PP doesn't specially states the gender of the person you're adressing (pretty much like in English), so you have to do with adjectives. For example
"Tu eres raro(a)" = You are quirky
You have to conjugate the attribute according to your listener gender.
In defense of his statement, we do have adjectives with ambivalent gender (not neuter), for example:
"Tu eres peculiar" = You are quirky
Peculiar (pronounced "peh-cool--yar") is valid for both femenine and masculine. It's not neuter, bot ambivalent
@@Alex-ii9sp Spanish does not have neutral pronouns. Actually, in Portuguese the pronoun "nós" (we) can be used to a group of any gender, in Spanish, there are "nosotros" and "nosotras"... this last one used only for a group of women, and "nosotros" for men or group of mixed genders people.
The main difference is that Spanish has a kind of "neutral" article.... "lo"... it means something similar to "the", but it used in very specific situations, it's not used to nouns.
Portuguese:
a mulher (the woman)
o homem (the man)
Spanish:
la mujer (the woman)
el hombre (the man)
"LO" is used only to something abstract, not specified, usually adjectives:
Lo bueno (the good)
Lo malo (the bad)
Lo importante (the important)
Those cases above when it comes to general ideas, if you specify something you have to agree with the word gender.
"La mala idea" (the bad idea). (In this case "idea" is a feminine word, so "LA" is used.
"El inicio malo" (the bad start). (In this case "inicio" is a masculine word, so "EL" is used.
I grew up speaking Spanish. In my experience, Portuguese speakers understand Spanish with no issue. However, Portuguese speakers change how they speak to be understood by Spanish speakers.
Otherwise, i find Brazilian Portuguese easier to understand than European Portuguese. But it's not easy
Brazilian Portuguese is talked slower, so is easier to understand. European Portuguese is complicated to understand even for us due to faster speech in Portugal
European portugeuse is scary. So I'm learning Brazilian Portuguese. And I do like Brazil more, in all fairness. Both countries are great
it's easier to simplify sounds and add letters to make portuguese sound like spanish, but it can irritate some people, because all in all, we are mocking the way espanohablantes speak...
I mean, we can say "Olha, tua mãe tá correndo atrás do cachorro!" but we absolute lose it when someone says "¡Mira, tu madre está corriendo detrás del perro!" it sounds way too funny for us
@@rogercruz1547 We spanish speakers do the same 🤣, we make Spanish sound like overexagerated portuguese because it sounds like a drunkard talking (Not saying portuguese sounds like that, we make it sound that way on purpose)
@@joshuepico75 Like we add itos to the end of every word and everytime there's an "e" we use "ie" instead hahah
The Brazilians and the rest of us South Americans can understand easily each other speaking "portuñol" a kind of a made up mix between both languages, so we don't have to learn the other language, only if we want to. Except for maybe some words here and there, communication is no problem ✌️
Makes sense that people who are very busy with their lives wouldn't have time to learn another language (as similar as they are) would do this. Other languages that are NOT similar at all do this too, but it still makes sense, as long as the other person can understand you, I suppose.
Yeah, we don't have to learn, but it would be better if we learn it.
Funnily enough, my European Portuguese family has a little trouble understanding Brazilian Portuguese. I guess it's sort of like an American trying to decipher Cockney.
Do italian and Spanish as similar but not identicalbut why Frech is not
@@nateh1135 it's the opposite way, a Cockney trying to decipher American English
As a portuguese speaker, if a spanish person speaks slowly i can understand the general idea
I'm Mexican and I've always got problems understanding people speaking portuguese (at least before I started learning the language), but a lot of people I know can understand it with just their Spanish knowledge
In my experience (being a Brazilian) Portuguese speakers have a easier time understanding Spanish than the opposite, the main reason I think are two: the difference between stress-timing and syllable-timing - specially as a Brazilian because Brazilian Portuguese stress is a lot weaker than Portugal's - and the fact that Portuguese have more phonemes than Spanish, for example: Portuguese have 9 vowels phonemes against Spanish with 5. Other fact is the letter ñ (n with tilde), despite Portuguese not having the letter in specific, it has an equivalent in "nh" but the opposite for letters like "ã" (a with tilde, a nasal form of "a") does not happen.
Technically, portuguese has at least 12 vowels if you count nasals
Spanish has nasal vowels too, but they're not written. Contrast "maçã" with "manzana", and the hypothetical word "mazan" in Spanish.
@@MultiSenhor more importantly, they’re not phonemic. In Spanish, nasal vowels only occur between nasal consonants or before a nasal coda. It can be difficult to notice Portuguese’s nasal vowels when there’s no nasal consonant following it.
I think Brazilian Portuguese is syllable-timing as spanish is. I'm Brazilian and some words in European Portuguese is understandable. The word "colesterol" is a example.
Brasilian Portuguese is actually syllable-timed in most varieties also.
I studied Spanish and lived in Spain for 10 years. And I oftenly encountered Portuguese language too, mostly written. And written language is pretty understandable if you know Castellano. But when you listen to Portuguese speaking the level of comprehension drops significantly.
I read that the spoken Portuguese is more difficult to Spanish speakers understand than spoken Spanish to Portuguese natives
But here in South America we can understand each other well if we speak "portuñol" 😂, it's so funny mix the two languages randomly and it works
El portugués parece fácil hasta que escuchas el portugués europeo xddd
@@zarzaparrilla67 Como brasileña puedo decir que tampoco entendemos de qué están hablando, no te preocupes
It's because, different from European Portuguese (which has many vogal reductions), the Brazilian Portuguese is pronounced in a more syllabic way, like Spanish.
Depende de que país de suramerica, casi todos tienen frontera con Brasil pero no siempre hay mucha interacción y no hay necesidad de hablar portuñol así que no existe, yo soy Colombiana, mi país tiene frontera con Brasil en el Amazonas donde aunque puede que si se hable un portuñol también hay más lenguas indígenas no es tan común para nosotros encontrarnos con un brasileño en el interior del país y la verdad hasta hace 2 años que empecé a aprender el idioma entendía cada 3era palabra que decía un brasileño.
One correction regarding Spanish is that we don't have neutral gendered nouns and pronouns. It's the same as Portuguese, with only male and female. The male ones are used to mean both male and combined groups. A group of people including both males and females will be referred to as "ellos" in Spanish and "eles" in Portuguese, which is the male plural.
I'm Portuguese speaker, but learned Spanish in school. The singular article "lo" is usually taught as the "neutral article"; Portuguese doesn't have anything like this. Spanish doesn't have a neutral gender like e.g. German, but perhaps it's the source of the confusion.
Just a small correction: we don't sey "male" or "female", but "masculine" and "feminine" - the the latter two are for biological gender, i.e. sex, and only apply to sexuate living beings; the former are a grammatical feature that may or may not have a correlation to the sex of the thing: "mesa" is not a female being, but the word is feminine.
@@leopiccionia right, it makes sense for it to be confusing to non-Spanish speakers. I'm always grateful to have been born into Spanish instead of having to learn it cuz it can be such a complicated and convoluted language 😂
@@nahuelma97lo feels masculine though. I think "o" in Portuguese applies to it too. We also have "lo" but to put in end of verbs... Just like "o" , and a and la... Well..
@@TheHoonJinSpanish el/la/lo come from Latin ille/illa/illud. Words ending with um/ud/us in Latin tended to be reduced to end in -o in both Spanish and Portuguese (e.g. portus > puerto/porto.
Because it was very common for masculine and neuter words in Latin to end in us and ud respectively, when you reduce them they become the same ending and the genders merge for all intents and purposes.
But for this word in particular, the neuter ended in -ud while the masculine ended in -e. So the neuter became lo and ille became el and the distinction was maintained. We might expect the masculine to have been le, but the e at the end tended to get lost in the next word and eventual it was dropped.
Interestingly, this reduction is the reason we have cases where feminine words take an apparent masculine article (e.g “el agua”). It’s not the masculine article, it’s just that “illa aqua” became “el agua” because the two a’s next to each other merged and one was lost.
I’ve gone to Brazil on business and vacation. I’ve done business speaking Spanish and hearing Portuguese back. We can understand each other.
More than the stress, the “s” sound in casa is the main difference btw Spanish and Portuguese pronunciations. In Portuguese, it sounds more like a “z” between vowels
It actually is a z, s always (and that is one of the rarest real rules) became voiced in between vowels in a word. Not apply to word boundaries however, so "o Sol" stills sounds /osɔl/
@@iantino */u/ /sów/ or /sól/
@@iantinoisso é Interessante, pois eu diria "Casas amarelas" assim: "cazazamarelas". Com o s tendo o som de z
@@Marcos_Viktor Nesse caso é a transcrição de /z/ como . Em finais de palavras, tende a ser vocalizado, mas no começo de palavras não ocorre isso, mesmo tendo uma vogal antes. Isso não quer dizer que exista o som de S entre vogais, mas elas nunca são representadas por apenas um , ou é por um ou . E também existem palavras em que tem som de /z/ mesmo não estando entre vogais e estando no meio de uma palavra, como transação /tɾɐnzaˈsɐ̃w̃n/
As a person who speaks both Portuguese and Spanish (and is mostly familiar with the American "varieties" of said languages), if we speak slowly enough, we are mutually intelligible. Portuguese speakers seem to have an easier time understanding Spanish, but it may be a personal bias (since I'm Brazilian)
Isso é porque o português tem muitas influências de outros idiomas, é como se o espanhol fosse do latim (tem línguas indígenas também, mas não tanto quando o português tem de outras) o português é do latim, das linhas árabes (alface, armazém, álcool, algema e mais um monte), das línguas africanas, das línguas indígenas e de algumas palavras do chinês e japonês (chá veio do chinês 茶 que se lê c h á, no segundo tom). Ou seja o português: tem muito vocabulário em comum com o espanhol (a parte do latim), mas o espanhol não tem tanto (as outras partes)
As a Brazilian, here are my two cents: Portuguese has fairly more phonetic vowels than Spanish thereby making Spanish somewhat easier to grasp than the other way around 😊
The main issue is that if you use a word to mean something you can end up meaning other.
You think its the same word, but its not.
At the same time, I realized that both languages have different ways to express the same idea.
Sometimes, both languages have the same words, but while in Portuguese we dont use a word anymore in Spanish it's used daily.
The written languages are very very similar, so I'd say we can understand about 95% of each other written texts. But pronunciation is a lot more different. How much we'll understand each other will vary a lot based on many factors.
One of them is where you are from. Brazilians can understand more Spanish than Spanish speakers can understand Portuguese. This is due to the fact that Portuguese have some more sounds, specially the very nasal "ã" (many foreigners struggle with this sound) and also because more Spanish reach Brazil than Portuguese reach Spanish speaking countries, so Brazilians are more used to Spanish than Spanish speakers to Portuguese.
Even if words are similar, there's also a fact that words that are common in a language, might exist but not be common in the other. For example, the common word for "to change" is "cambiar" in Spanish. That word "câmbio" meaning "change" also exist in Portuguese, but is only used in very specific situations. We use the much more common word "trocar". One more example is "pelear" (to fight). In Portuguese "pelejar" reminds us of medieval fighting. Another is "recordar" (to remember). The word exist in Portuguese, it means the same thing, but sounds sofisticated. We usually use the more common word "lembrar". So, in a sense, Spanish sounds "sophisticated" to Brazilian ears.
Finally, this similarity is actually not that good to learn the other language. Because it is so similar, we are always asking ourselves, "is this word the same, or different?". If we were to learn Chinese, then we know that we either know, or don't know a word. But in Portuguese-Spanish, we are always wondering if we already know a word or not.
The pronounciation of "casa" in the Portuguese of Portugal makes it so the second A is almost not pronounced (almost like "Caz") and in Brazilian Portuguese the second A is almost a schwa. Portuguese is a stress-based language but in Portugal the stress is a lot stronger whereas in Brazil it's a lot weaker, although it happens in a slightly different way as well. For example, the word "gente" in Portugal is pronounced "gent" while in Brazil it's "genty", the second E becomes an I
In European Portuguese, the second A in "casa" is pronounced exactly like a schwa, and it's definitely not almost "caz" because that schwa is ALWAYS pronounced. I think you're mistaking this for the closed E which can almost be ommitted when Portuguese people speak. This closed E and the schwa are 2 different sounds.
More like Genchy
@@ethandouro4334 Not in some accents in the South or Northeast
Thats not true mate
@@Sergiovision not always. for example casa inglesa would be pronounced cazinglesa
Ç team here. Brazilian Portuguese is also syllabe-timed, and that's the main difference in speech when compared to European Portuguese. LangFocus has a really cool video explaining the nitty-gritty details. Totally the same language though.
As for Spanish, we find it really easy to understand, but they never get what we're saying XD... Nevermind the shared vocabulary, it's all about the phonetics. ES lacks some sounds that PT uses... The sound for V in ES is identical to B, and we use a bunch of nasal sounds (~).
Wrong. The São Paulo accent is syllabe-timed. The northeastern accents are stress-syllabe.
@@wandson5410 says who?
Actually in some regions of Hispano-America influenced by local languages, regions of Spain influenced by Morocco there _is_ a difference between B and V, it's just extremely subtle. The B is bilabial (uses both lips) and the V is labiodental (uses upper teeth and bottom lip to produce the sound). But generally they're identical.
Things are somewhat more complicated than that. As a native Brazilian Portuguese speaker from São Paulo, my speech is clearly stress-timed, though there's definitely far less vowel reduction than in European Portuguese. From what I've researched, it seems that certain Brazilian dialects (such as the Northeastern dialect) are more syllable-timed than others.
These people from São Paulo clearly don't know the difference between syllable-time and stress-time, but as usually they like to be the ones a part of the rest of Brasil. THE WHOLE BRASIL SPEAKS SYLLABLE-STRESS PORTUGUESE. When we speak, we pronounce all syllables in the word. In Portugal, sometimes they contract 2 syllables in 1
It largely depends on how much the person is used to listen to Spanish. For some other Brazilians, spoken Spanish is as alien as Russian and they don't get a single word, doesn't matter the dialect. For people that have taken some Spanish classes and listened to Spanish songs, they'll have an easier time understanding it. Peruvian and some Colombian accents are said to be the easiest to understand. Written Spanish has a very high degree of intelligibility even for those who can't understand it when spoken.
como falante de portugues eu descordo totalmente do que você disse. Nenhum sotaque espanhol faz com que nós não entendamos nada como não entenderiamos o russo. Alguns são mais fáceis que outros, mas qualquer variedade do espanhol é fácil suficiente para lusofonos compreenderem a maior parte do discurso.
@@talisonm1984 dependendo do dialeto até mesmo o português, pra alguns brasileiros, principalmente os com menos acesso a educação ou menos acostumados, é incompreensível. Vide açoriano.
@@valerioluizfelipe eu nunca ouvi um dialeto português que não entendesse, mesmo o dialetos africanos muito forte eu acho totalmente compreensível. O que dificulta o entendimento é a velocidade da fala.
Tudo vai depender se o hispânico-falante falar de uma maneira formal da língua, sem falar em gírias.
Funny, as a Colombian, that’s what I’m told by my accent
~8:58 Vulgar Latin wasn't really a "kind" of Latin, it just refers to all the different ways the common people spoke across the empire. The Vulgar Latin spoken in France would have been different from the Vulgar Latin spoken in Spain, for example, rather than there being a single form of Latin spoken in both that was different from proper Latin.
I was in Brazil and saw a newspaper article about a borracheiro cego, which I thought was a blind drunkard. It isn't. It's a blind tire changer!
An Italian school friend's dad back in the days was, somehow, an acquaintance of none other than Paco de Lucia. We were invited to a close by concert and after party, and I was completely amazed that said dad and Pacco could communicate with ease throughout the night, but then be told the next day that friend's dad would have had close to no chance with a Portugese person.
It was an amazing evening, although I retrospectively fear that the thing linking these two people wasn't entirely legal. The champaign and upscale meals were an impressive experience as a low-mid class 14 year old though, and man could Paco play the guitar.
I speak Castilano fluently, a dialect not totally dissimilar to the Tras os Montes dialect of Lusitano Portuguese. Understanding spoken Portuguese takes a lot of concentration, as the vowels are notably different.
Nice video! Some notes:
4:58 in the word "casa" is not only the stressed A that is different. In Portuguese if you have an S in the middle of the word surrounded by vowels, it is pronounced as a Z, so you pronounce it like "CÁZA".
5:37 Never ever heard of "perro" in Portuguese (maybe it's European?)
7:19 All my Spanish speaking friends that don't speak Portuguese say that it is easy for them to read Portuguese, but to understand it is very hard, while me and other Brazilian friends usually have an easier time understanding Spanish depending on the accent (I myself think that Mexican, Paisa (from Medellin) and Central/North Spain are the easiest ones). I heard an explanation for that once saying that it is due the fact that Portuguese is more complex phonetically, we have all the sounds of Spanish plus a few more (like nasal ones), don't know if it's true though.
Fun fact: Galician (the language spoken in.. well.. Galicia) is even more intelligible to Portuguese. Apart from some words you just have to change the G,J sound for X,CH.
Well, perro is more found in European Portuguese, for sure, but, for what I know even there isn't that common.
never heard a portuguese person say "perro", it's either cão or cachorro (for small dogs/puppies).
@@calebsousa2754 it's just very uncommon, it means "dog", but also "stiff" and by extension of the last "stubborn."
Being from the Northwest of Spain, I speak both Spanish and Galician, which is a language that you could describe as being halfway between Spanish and Portuguese :)
Galician is a lot closer to Portuguese though. The only thing in Galician that is somewhat close to Castillian is pronunciation, and that is only because of decades of forced assimilation.
Galician is easier for Brazilians to understand than most varieties of European Portuguese. And written Galician almost looks like Portuguese with some typoes.
It’s a gorgeous language!
@@sohopedeco Galician is easier for Brazilians to understand than European Portuguese? Now that's a bad take. Of course that isn't true, and it could never have been true.
@@sohopedeco lol, I'm brazilian and there was a time when I became obcessed with galician and started watching galician youtubers doing comedy sketches and for god's sake I couldn't understand most of it (even though I actively studied it a lot). On the other hand I've also watched portuguese youtubers wuant and mathgurl and can understand them perfectly.
@@calebsousa2754 Those Portuguese youtubers are easy too understand because they have a majority Brazilian audience and try to tone down their accent. Regular Portuguese people on the street cam barely be understood.
As a brazilian portuguese speaker its a lot easier to understand Spanish written than spoken but its also dialect dependent, some dialects are completely unintelligible to me while others are very easy to grasp
Yeah, the Spanish spoken in Narcos for example (the Colombian one) was quite easy to understand. Sometimes I didn't need the subtitles at all
I speak both Spanish and Portuguese. It fascinates me to no end how similar they are, and how they have diverged from one single place Into such different things. The biggest difference is the pronunciation. Spanish has 5 vowel sounds, Portuguese has 9 and the pronunciation with the extra vowel sounds makes it sound so different. That makes it easier for Portuguese speakers to understand Spanish than the reverse, but Spanish speakers can understand to some extent. But then you have words that are the same as you pointed out that mean something completely different, and words that exist in both languages with the same meaning but one doesn't use commonly. For example in Portuguese the more commonly used verb "to think" is achar while in Spanish pensar. Pensar exists and it is used in Portuguese but only under certain circumstances and less often. There are reverse examples for words not used in Spanish more used in Portuguese. It is the same with certain verb tenses that are used in one and not the other, or which person used for the conjugation. This leads those of us who know both to fall into the dreaded Portuñol trap, where you say something in one language but you are using the rules from the other. This doesn't even take into account the numerous and extensive variety of accents in both languages that even native speakers cannot always understand in their own language.
To anyone confused about gender neutrality in spanish:
The spanish neuter article (lo) and neuter pronoun (ello) refer to abstract objects and are therefore an even more specific yet limited variant of the latin neuter. Italian "lo" is a variant of the masculine "il" used for euphonic reasons. The closely related asturian does have an entire grammatical neuter class but it only refers to collective nouns.
Indo-European neuters do not normally refer to people but to objects, neuter gender for people is generally a germanic innovation (english "they" or the dutch common gender) or an academic neologism ("elle/elles" pronouns in spanish).
There's nothing too weird about neologisms in IE languages to be fair, the entire T-V distinction that made english use "you" instead of "thou" was a medieval grammatical innovation that spread from central europe, for example.
Elle/elles no existen en español, son sólo una monstruosidad NO académica. You should do a little research before stating such a misleading comment
I ordered a copy of a magazine once, that was available in Spanish and Portuguese. I asked for Spanish and received Portuguese. I was hoping to improve my Spanish, but it didn't take me long to figure out that I had Portuguese. It was sort of amusing, in my case.
As a Brazilian myself, when they are talking in a normal speed for them, is very difficult to understand what they are saying, but if they speak slowly I can understand 90% using the context.
06:10 I'm Brazilian, from Rio de Janeiro, and in the northern region of the state we have a region called "Região dos Lagos", which is very popular with hispanic tourists (in particular Argentinians). Whenever I vacation there, i get the impression that hispanic speakers might even outnumber portuguese speakers, not only because of tourism, but also because of immigration, which is significant. I found that it was very easy to communicate with our hispanic neighbours, as long as both of us spoke slowly and clearly. The Argentinians living there often don't even learn portuguese fluently, because they get by just fine speaking Spanish, or Portuñol, our hybrid language.
I am an Italian native speaker, I have a very easy time with understanding both of these languages. If I hear someone speaking Spanish I can usually make out all but 1-2 words, same with Portuguese. Just love my Latin brothers and being able to understand them most the time.
generally i'd say spanish has an advantage for it is a much more "known" language, more present in (pop) culture, whereas portuguese is rather unknown. in my experience, though, in written form both languages' natives do very well understanding each other, up to a 95%+. in South America, we can really catch up to each others' language rather easily, but in europe spaniards can understand portuguese better when spoken by... brazilians! the supression of vowels, typical of european portuguese, makes it a bit harder to be understood.
It's also why some speakers have trouble understanding Andalusians, as they do tend to speak in a very similar way to Algarvians.
I grew up with Portuguese (European) and learned Spanish (Caribbean) in college. I was able to get the gist of Spanish shows growing up. When Spanish-speakers hear me speak Portuguese at normal speed, they tend not to understand me. I may be a bad person to gauge though since I know both fluently.
I speak Spanish natively and know some Portuguese. Written Portuguese is nearly mutually intelligible, maybe around 90%. Spoken Portuguese is very hard to understand if you're not used to it. Maybe you'll get every other word or so. It's easier with Brazilian Portuguese since it's more syllable-timed and has a bit more similarly to Spanish in phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary. If a Brazilian speaks slowly and clearly, it's not too hard to get by. Iberian Portuguese is VERY hard to understand, however. So much so that Catalán and even Italian are often easier to understand when spoken.
Brasailian Portuguese mutually intelligible?
@@diegomarquez3293 I wouldn't go that far. There's still a ton of words that are completely different, but most basic words are similar enough that you can get the gist of simple sentences
Italian can't be easier to undertsand. It's just exposure. Piccolo is a word the world over knows....and most spanish people probably wouldn't be able to say pequeno, without a ñ, is the portuguese word for the same thing.
So, as a portuguese, I agree the syllable-timed aspect of brazilian portuguese makes it easier to understand (and yes, similarities in phonetics, possibly grammar.....not vocabulary though; brazilian vocabulary isn't closer to spanish vocab than european portuguese).
But the "weirdness" factor of the SOUND of european portuguese being spoken.....just isn't there for italian or catalan because you've heard those languages more times. Yes, italians also open vowels more...but that's it.
In fact....we can boil ALL of this down to one thing -.spanish people don't understand closed or guttoral vowel sounds in european portuguese. The catalans, DO have some similar sounds though. It's all exposure. A european portuguese also ONLY understands castillan better... because he or she is more exposed. Otherwise we'd have the exact same "weird" feeling.
From what I can say, portuguese speakers really understand spanish speakers better than the other way around, I've studied spanish and from what I can tell, spanish sounds a lot like archaic/formal portuguese, maybe that's why it happens the way it is(and yes, there is also the portuguese pronunciation which is a bit more complex than the spanish one)
Yes, you could say Spanish (and italian) are a lot closer to vulgar Latin when it comes to grammar and phonetics than Portuguese (or French) which diverged a lot more.
btw this guy’s name means “southern loan shark” and I think that’s beautiful
Do ponto de vista brasileiro sim, porque os portugueses falam o português certo.
Muitas vezes se você traduz literalmente uma frase do espanhol pro português fica estranho, parece português de Portugal.
🇪🇸 no te preocupes/ no se preocupe
🇵🇹 não te preocupes/ não se preocupe
🇧🇷não preocupa/ não se preocupa
🇪🇸no te quiero decir/ no quiero decirte
🇵🇹não te quero dizer/ não quero dizer-te
🇧🇷 não quero te dizer
🇪🇸 siéntate / siéntese
🇵🇹 senta-te /sente-se
🇧🇷 senta/se senta
@@antoniopera6909 There's also "no se preocupe" in Spanish used with 'usted' (você)
@@antoniopera6909 isso é normal e entendível,o que eu estou falando mesmo é de vocabulário e de outras estruturas gramaticais que para nós são completamente estranhas
i think because of the difference between stress-timing and syllable-timing, portuguese ppl have a bit of an easier time understanding spanish as all the vowel sounds are familiar while the other way around they have to parse somewhat unfamiliar vowel sounds
I speak both. The pronunciation is really the most different part. Indeed, Portuguese speakers understand more easily Spanish speakers than vice-versa, but that's because Portuguese has a more complex phonology
5:54 it’s spelled Lunes in Spanish not Lujnes
Awesome video. This is cool info!
Native Portuguese speaker here.
Spanish has always been intelligible for me and my family, as it is for most portuguese people. When I moved to Spain, as a grown up, I managed to learn and become fluent just from speaking to people. I caught up on grammar by reading the newspaper.
Later I had a relationship with a spanish person who never learned proper Portuguese, despite living in Portugal and me always speaking Portuguese.
Spanish people in general have a hard time understanding Portuguese. Despite the many similarities, the phonetic is different, so the mere fact that we use nasal sounds and pronounce "ch", "g", "j" "x" or " z" differently completely boggles them. I've had spanish people telling me that Portuguese sounds like Polish or Russian.
I had a similar experience in Brazil, in three different states - many people didn't understand my native dialect, so I had to switch into a generic brazilian dialect to be understood. This didn't happen in the Portuguese-speaking african countries where I've been - quite understandably, because half a century of independence is not the same as 200 years of independence.
Fun fact: portuguese telenovelas broadcasted in Brasil have to be voiceover-ed or subtitled.
Essa da novela é real, certa vez eu estava passando os canais e vi uma novela portuguesa passando e ela realmente estava dublada.
@@williamthierry5976 Noope. Novelas brasileiras que passam em Portugal não têm legendas nem dobragem. Nem na SIC, nem na Globo Portugal, que são os 2 maiores canais com novelas brasileiras no seu conteúdo.
Brazilian here. When I meet a spanish speaking person I speak portuguese but just slow it down a couple of notches and normally the other person does the same. Also I am aware of false friends ( words that are the same but different meaning ) and keep that in mind. I live very far away from a border with any spanish speaking country so my contact with spanish speakers are very very very rare. People that live near borders are more accustomed to both languages and their pitfalls so they are able to talk to each other pretty normally in their respective mother tongues.
I'm Portuguese and when it comes to Spanish I can understand it when it's written because it's not that different, but it's harder to understand actual Spanish people talking.
I do have noticed that even though understanding the Spanish is hard, the other way around must be even more because when some Spanish tourists ask us anything they will take a bit staring at us trying to understand our answers (maybe they're just dumb).
And yes brazilian-portuguese is very different from our european-portuguese, same goes for Angola and Mozambique, although in my opinion the brazilian one is more different than these. I remember sometimes when I went to school, there were some brazilian students who would say a word or an expression that isn't really used in Portugal and the teachers would warn them that they couldn't write that in evaluations/tests...because as you can see there's a lot of different vocabulary in these two versions.
my colombian friends can communicate with brazilian friends perfectly fine
Man your video is the best way for me to fall asleep when I have insomnia.
Great video 🔥
I’m a native English speaker, but I also speak Portuguese. I understand Spanish just fine if the speaker is kind enough to speak slowly. I can’t seem to make myself understood, however. (For context I’m in the US and most of the Spanish speakers I encounter speak Mexican Spanish).
Thx for the info partick. ❤
I’m Mexican and I’m able to speak both languages fluently,
However there are some sounds in Portuguese that we don’t have in Spanish, therefore is difficult to know if I’m pronouncing properly, as an example, doce, doze, dose, of course Brazilians will understand by the context, but for sure every word has a unique pronunciation, but for me sounds quite similar each other.
That's interesting. I'm brazilian and never thought about how similar these 3 words can sound to Spanish speakers
BRUH! So good! So fascinating!
I don't speak Portuguese, though I can somewhat read it. I speak Spanish, but not well. (I pronounce Spanish with a mixed "gringo" accent, but if I pronounce Portuguese, it's with a distinctly European accent since most of my exposure is from watching TV from Portugal.)
Casa is more like CAH-zuh in Portuguese and CAH-sah in Spanish. Lonely S's surrounded by vowels in Portuguese make a Z sound and weak A's sound like the "uh" sound in English
Galician itself sounds like Portuguese spoken with a strictly Spanish accent. It's a good proxy for how well Portuguese and Spanish speakers could potentially understand each other without studying each other's languages in more depth.
CAH-zah in Brasil...
@@rogercruz1547ninguém no Brasil fala KÁ-zá (CAH-zah)
A gente fala KÁ-zâ (CAH-zuh)
@@antoniopera6909 In theory. In practice, I think you guys open the second vowell in everyday speech a lot.
I didn’t know name explain became lang explain all the sudden. It’s a pleasant surprise
Thanks for the shout out to Macau! (Although we hardly speak Portuguese anymore)
As a Spanish speaker, I can easily read Portuguese with minor issues, but I have a very hard time understanding it spoken. I’ve been able to speak to Brazilian people with some difficulty but it was very doable.
Without watching the video, and as a Spanish speaker I can tell you: They're similar. I found this to be THE MOST out of other romance languages. I went to Brazil and me speaking spanish and locals speaking portuguese we understood each other really well.
Portuguese here. I'd say it depends on the contact you have with the other language. I'm from Lisbon area and when I visited the interior of Portugal I could hardly understand the people who live near the border, my guess is they understand better Spanish than I do. If a spanish person speaks slowly I can understand them. When watching spanish tv I need to have subtitles to understand it but even then there are verb conjugations or idiomatic expressions that I need to try and figure out by logic what is meant.
From the times I had interactions with spanish people they could seldom understand me even when I tried to speak their language, guess my spanish just sucks xD
I am from Brazil. When I went to Argentina and Mexico, I understood the Spanish of them by they didn't understand my portuguese
Small correction Portuguese DOES have a gender neutral gender but most people analyze it as a masculine in fact I would go so far as to say that Portuguese has a feminine gender and a neuter gender however if you place emphasis on the neutral it turns into a masculine since this is more accurate to how Portuguese gender actually works.
as a spanish speaker portuguese is easy to read but difficult to understand spoken
Cool to learn who the languages was formed.
It should have included Catalan!
Very nice video! My mom is a native speaker of Spanish and my dad is a native speaker of Portuguese, they are both pretty similar but not similar enough to be the same language.
As a portuguese speaker I can kind of understand spanish if the person is patient enough to speak slowly, and it is really easy to understand written spanish but watching spanish people talking fluently is totally impossible for me
During the War of the Triple Alliance there were some Paraguayans who would attempt to avoid being shot by Brazilian soldiers by claiming to be from Southern Brazil, which has a colloquial accent fairly similar to Spanish. The Brazilian soldiers, if suspicious, would then point to their hand and ask "What is this called?". In Portuguese that would be the word "mão", and the Spanish speaking Paraguayans could not say the "ã" and were the shot. I have tried teaching Portuguese to both English and Spanish speaking friends of mine and have noticed that both often cannot even hear a difference between "ã" and just "a".
i speak both. for a spanish speaker, portuguese is way harder to listen bcs it has a lot more sounds and word variations. being very similar helps a lot, but sometimes it can be a problem when you think you know a word but it ends up being completely wrong in the other language, or when you are sure it is completely different and it ends up being literally the same word. but for reading? yeah, a spanish speaker or portuguese speaker could read and understand 90% of a text in eatchother language
I live in the area of Galicia where it’s hard to remember the distinctions between the three.
6:24 I don't speak either really, but my mother is a native European Portuguese speaker and my best friend is a native Peruvian Spanish speaker. My mother has told me she can understand the gist of Spanish and that it really just sounds like "Portuguese with a lisp"; my Peruvian friend said he can't understand a word of Portuguese. Take that as you will.
I'll also add the Brazilian Portuguese is a very different dialect to European Portuguese, and that there is a language barrier there too. Think of an American trying to understand Cockney.
Cockney sounds like a breed of dog 🐕🐶
Hahaha 😂😂😂
It sounds like you are saying American trying to understand a 🐶🐕 dog!!! Hahaha 😂😂😂
That would probably be a challenge for both sides!!!
Except both Portugal and Brazil have tons of accents and sub-dialects. Put an Algarvian and a Mineiro together, they'll understand eachother just right. An Azorean though.. not so much.
My family name comes from the Portuguese word for key, and I finally understand why it's ch instead of ll (since the Spanish word for key sounds exactly the same). On my mom's side of the family, I'm descended from French assassins who crossed the Pyrenees; apparently my Portuguese heritage is much the same, only the Chávez brothers were highly respected--they're the ones who people entrusted with the keys to their family estates when the Moors invaded. Thanks for helping me understand my family history a little better!
No sé si fueran los únicos Cháves, y sin contar a los Argentinos, llaves no se pronuncia igual que “Chaves”
Chávez no tiene nada que ver con 'chave' 😅 Vaya película te montaste
When I was a young teen, my mom - a Spanish speaker, befriended her boss - a Portuguese speaker. Both our families would get together on the weekend, and the two women - my mom and her boss - would literally speak, laugh and cry for hours and hours. Yet, when my mom's boss would approach me and speak to me in Portuguese, she might as well have been speaking Cantonese because I didn't understand a word. This never changed, even years later.
So, yes, some Spanish and Portuguese speakers understand each other quite well. Meanwhile, other Spanish and Portuguese speakers don't understand each other at all...
As a Spanish speaker I can read most things in Portuguese and understand it well. As for speaking it’s a lot harder honestly. You can understand some things but the vocab is so different that holding a full convo would be very difficult without knowing some Portuguese. I also do know some Portuguese though.
Anybody else notice the J in "lunes"?
Using the "casa" example
In Portuguese the S in "casa" is pronounced like a Z, whereas if there were two S, it would be pronounced like Spanish
Similarly the letter R
Car -> carro -> carro
In Pt it's pronounced like an English "H", while in Spanish they rrrrrreally roll their Rs
While
Expensive -> caro -> caro
Both are pronounced the same lol
I also can confirm that Portuguese speakers can understand Spanish better and not the other way around because the main words Spanish uses are old synonyms
I can also confirm that if it's written it's easier for both
You are making a mistake here, the rolling R depends on the accent, and in fact, in most of portugal the RR sound in "carro" is a strong R like you find in germanic languages. It is nowhere near the H in english languages.
@@Random2 should have specified I’m BRAZILIAN Portuguese
But true, also forgot to mention depends on the region of Brazil too
Towards the south, the “Rs” in “carro” to sound like Rs in the Spanish “carro” 👍
@@n1hondudeYes. some places in the south has the rolled r in every word, but they are minority.
@@n1hondude in Mozambique they also roll the Rs
spanish is my native tongue and before i learned portuguese, i recall it not being so mutually intelligible. if someone spoke slowly enough i could definitely get the general idea (for the most part) but listening to music or watching tv was difficult to follow many times. i definitely think spanish is easier to understand for portuguese speakers though. you should have mentioned galician, the closest language to portuguese. galician and portuguese separated from the same branch of the family language and are mutually intelligible. it is also pretty close to spanish in my opinion. even if i didn’t speak portuguese like i do now, i feel like i would easily understand galician because i speak spanish. galician feels like a bridge in between spanish and portuguese, though it is definitely closer to the latter.
Most Portuguese dialects are syllable-timed. European Portuguese is the only one that is stress-timed and that is a recent phenomenon. Most Portuguese speakers understand some degree of Spanish. For Spanish speakers, it's more difficult, especially with European Portuguese.
Portuguese spoken in Brazil, specially in the center of Brazil in places like Rio and Sao Paulo, is more stress-timed than syllable-timed.
Brazilians will take a long time pronouncing the main syllable of a word and then reduce quite a lot the unstressed syllables to the point of making them disappear many times.
So a sentence like "Espera um pouco aí" will be prononced like "Perumpocaí".
"Esse homem é esperto" = "Sioméspert° ".
@@luksavat7750 interesting. I would expect this in Portugal most of the time.
Existe meio que uma cultura nos professores de português pra estrangeiros de tentar fazer o português brasileiro parecer mais próximo do espanhol, o que inclui muitas vezes "esquecer" que a gente reduz muito as sílabas (não tanto como em Portugal, mas ainda é longe de soar como espanhol).
A principal característica do português barsileiro é a redução vocálica nas sílabas átonas.
E = I
O = U
Em = Im
Om = Om
Ão = Um = U
Isso acaba fazendo que palavras como "comprido" e "cumprido" soem igual. O mesmo com
Peão = pião
Descrição = discrição
Óleo = olho (verbo)
That is cool to learn
Fun fact: if you're a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, you can automatically speak fluent Spanish by simply getting shitfaced drunk and then trying to talk normally :)
NH is used in portugese instead of Ñ. Both sound alike and are used in the same manner (between vowels).
As a Colombian Spanish speaker, In my experience I didnt understand a fucking word when I wnet to sao paulo. It also surprised me that most people I met in the street and in bars didnt speak a word of English. They did understand part of my Spanish, but it was very difficult. It also surprised me a couple of people I met though Colombia was in central america (which technically there is a part of the country in CA, but it's like saying USA is in Oceania because of the location of guam or hawaii)
Portuguese from brasil and from portugal have their fair share of differences too, if it werent for an effort from brasil and portugal with the many orthographic agreements we would probably have 2 different languages at this point.
13:10 I wonder what the „best authorities“ meant to indicate by the inclusion of what looks like internal border demarcations.
I lived in Argentina for two year (long story, don't ask). Whenever I'd hear someone speak Portuguese (a rare, but not unheard-of occurrence), I always thought it sounded like a French person learning to speak Spanish. I always wondered how Spanish sounded to someone who speaks Portuguese.
I dont wanna offend any one, but for my brazilian portuguese ears, spanish spounds like a lazy
person speaking portuguse without moving the tongue too much.
It sounds like someone trying to speak portuguese with a potato stuck in their mouths.
To me, Spanish sounds like a lazy person doing vowel sounds while speaking the language
@@TheZenytram unless it's the RR sounds
It sounds pretty annoying. I dont like Spanish.
im a native spanish speaker, andreally have no idea about portuguese, but i've been able to chat online with brazilian ppl with no real problem
What is he talking about with neutral gender in the video? I've never heard of that.
@@sonoftheway3528 "usted" is gender neutral, technically, though it's use is more as a fromalty rather than gender stuff
@@MrParac but that is 2nd person formal. 2nd person is gender neutral in a lot of languages. "You" in English is neutral. Doesn't Portuguese have "tu" and "vos" as well?
He was referring to grammatical gender. Of which I've never of neutral in Spanish. Every word in Spanish is either male or female, right?
@@sonoftheway3528 true... mmmmhhhhh well, there's "ello", althoug it is not really used outside of spain i forgot about that one since um from ecuador, is an equivalent for it
@@sonoftheway3528it doesn't exist
In both portugusese and spanish the netral is masculine
If you do the shopping in the Spanish market la Mercadona, mostly everything is in Spanish and Portuguese
As Brazilian I can say its easier for us to understand Spanish provided they speak slowly than the other way around.
The similarities actually make it more difficult to learn it because we have to constantly remember the many small differences. I remember the nightmare of trying to learn Spanish verb tenses when I had spanish classes at school.
The way to speak also sounds COMPLETELY different. I would say in Portuguese ( at least the Brazilian one) we say our sentences with a general pace and entonation very similar to that of english speakers, while in spanish sounds like they are trying to sing all the time.
O espanhol parece uma metralhadora. ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta.
É bastante monótono, staccato, todas as sílabas tem a mesma duração, tem muito ritmo, mas não há melodia.
O português é mais variável. Mais como um TA-ta-TA-ta-ta-TA-ta-ta-TA, há um ritmo mais leggato, as palavras se mesclam e parecem uma grande palavra interminável.
I'm Brazilian and I speak both Portuguese and Spanish. I can guarantee you, Brazilians can understand pretty much everything in Spanish, as long as it is not with a heavy accent, Brazilians have an easy understanding of foreign languages.
But Spanish speakers just have no idea what Portuguese speakers are saying most of the time.
I speak a dialect of Spanish, I have found that it shares a lot of pronunciation similarities with Portuguese (Brazilian). For example, my dialect features a lot of nasality and diphthongisation of vowels (note however, that the spelling for Standard Spanish and my dialect doesn't change).
As an example (using IPA) here are the words for "hand:"
Standard Spanish: /ˈmäno̞/
Spanish dialect: /mɐ̃͡ʊ̃/
Brazilian Portuguese: /mɐ̃͡õ/
Which dialect do you speak?
I’m a native English speaker, but I became kinda fluent in Spanish by living in Latin America. I can read in Portuguese with little difficulty. When I speak in Spanish, Brazilians can understand me pretty well, but when they reply in Portugues, it’s a little harder. I’ve been told before that my accent in Spanish sounds kinda Portugues, and that might be because my native English is also stress-timed. Great video so far, now I’ll watch the rest!
It’s surprising how someone who talks about languages doesn’t try to learn how to pronounce them.
When I was growing up, I thought Spanish was just Portuguese but being stubborn to be different lol
I speak Spanish and English. Everytime I speak with someone from Brasil (and less often, from Portugal) I struggle A LOT to understand them and making myself understood by them, especially if they don't speak English :/ in those cases, I must resign myself to using my native language (which they tend to understand better than I could understand theirs). Apparently, it has to do with the fact that Spanish only have five "actual" vowel sounds while Portuguese has many more (double at least, as far as I know).
Nevertheless, It's not impossible, it's just hard time...
Edit: Italian is easier for me.
I went on a holiday to Porto for a couple days and there were so many Spanish people speaking Spanish to the Portuguese workers in cafes, even the Portuguese workers spoke back to them in Spanish. I was astonished lol
The interesting thing isn't exactly that both languages are equal, but that the languages in Iberia basically form a gradient, with portuguese on one side and aragonese in the other (simplified), I can't understand aragonese, but Castilians and asturians say they can, so ok. In some areas the part where one language starts and the other ends is almost impossible to decipher. In South America we have basically two languages of Iberia and one creole (Papiamento) and we can all understand each other, but the main thing us that the languages have african and indigenous elements.
Ñ speaker (México), I can read Portuguese well enough. Hearing it I can understand most of it, especially if said slowly. Iberian languages are very interesting, especially the ones that are very similar such as Portuguese, Galician, and Castilian (known as Spanish worldwide). Some people in the American continent still refer to Spanish as Castilian, such as in South America.
Bear 🐻
Spanish: Oso.. which means bone in portuguese haha... Alys when i see this word in spnish only bone came to my mind, never bear 😂😂😂
So... Not sure one can call that northwestern Vulgar Latin as Galician Vulgar Latin. I think it was the localized northwestern proto-Romance covering Gallician-Portuguese, AND Asturian-Leonese and nearby proto Castilian (Burgos area?) near La Rioja? Elsewhere in the Northeast was moving easterly: Basque isolate then Navarro-Aragonese, and Occitano-Catalan-Valencian.
Also when he says that the other Iberian languages are "all gone", he doesnt mention Basque at all, which is still spoken
6:20 Brazilians can understand a little bit of spanish by defalt, but ONLY if the person talk very slowly and want to be understand.
I had a friend in my tanagehood that talk spanish with his sisters... I didn't recognized a thing in the tyme 😂😂😂
This happens with Italian too.
Not all varieties of Portuguese are stress-timed. Brazilian Portuguese, the one with most speakers is syllable-timed, just like Spanish. Which is the main reason why Spanish speakers find it easier to learn.
When i traveled to Argentina i could easily undertand what the people i met there said even though i didn't know any Spanish since i was only 8, but they couldn't understand what i said
I’m brazilian and a portuguese speaker, my brother who lives in canada is married to a spanish-speaking girl, they use english to communicate between themselves, and also to talk to her I need to use english, for me spanish is as similar as italian,french or romanian I would risk to say italian seems for me mire understandable than spanish
And is not just the words, or the way to say… a movie subtitled in spanish I cannot understand three words of it, nothing makes sense the words who write the same or dosen’t make sense have different meaning or are in place where don’t make sense, if I don’t pause the movie and the whole sentence possibly with a help of a translator I cannot understand and is easier change the subtitle to portuguese or english
And is not matter of accent also, portugal for instance have very different accent than brazil, however as a brazilian takes about 2 min to you get used to and you can talk to everybody similarly as an english speaker from usa talking to and english speaker from uk
Portuguese and Spanish are two completely different languages… they were one language in the past it was called latin, and was the time of the roman empire 1500 years later these languages are as separated as polish from russian or english from german
The only way for a brazilian speak spanish is on the same way a brazilian would speak english by doing a course learning in the class or moving to spanish speaking country and leaning the hard way there… otherwise I think is more likely a brazilian know english but really probably the majority are just portuguese monolingual
Lujnes? Do you mean "Lunes" right?