I don't find the languages all that similar when the differences are broken down the way they are but then this video has me geared to hear the differences when I wouldn't be listening for it in the wild so to speak. My mother (who is from Iran) never taught me fluent Farsi but I can understand very basic conversations (enough to tell what the gist of what someone is saying) and when I first heard someone speaking what I think was Dari (a language from Afghan) it sounded just like Farsi but I couldn't pull any words out that I understood and it threw me for a loop. My father also told me how he played a joke on my mother once by playing a song sung by an Afghani singer and my mother was confused because it sounded like Farsi but she couldn't understand anything. My father teased her by saying that maybe she had been in the U.S. for too long. Of course this may not be a fair comparison because supposedly the language they speak in Afghanistan is closer to the original Persian than modern day Farsi spoken in Iran. Again, supposedly when they were trying to resurrect the original Persian in Iran after it having been supplanted by Arabic they used the language spoken in Afghanistan as a model (sorry if my understanding of how they brought Farsi *back* to Iran is a bit muddled but I'm relaying what my mother told me and haven't done research on it).
I do. I speak French from Canada and some of the sounds we have are close to those of Russian and even more to those of Portuguese, since French and Portuguese are Romance languages. In fact, I could be hearing Portuguese through a wall and think people in the other room spoke French. I has to do with the fact that we use lots of nasal sounds. I talked about the similarities in pronunctiation between Russian and the French-Canadian accent to a coworker from Moldova and she was impressed of how noticeable it was. We remove vowels and the result is a succession of consonnants. For exemple, spasiba can be said with the exact same pronunction as we would say "it's not that low" (c'pas si bas : ce n'est pas si bas). It's almost as if the cold from both places froze our jaw and slurred our speech.
I definitely do not hear Portuguese and think it is similar to Russian. I also think it depends if a Speaker is Using The "Received Pronunciation" of Their Language and not The "Casual Pronunciation". :)
I had honestly never heard European Portuguese before! Brazilian Portugese definitely doesn't sound similar, but yes I do find that European Portuguese does sound like a very slavic Spanish. I don't speak Portuguese or any Slavic language, but I do speak Spanish and it was a bit of a headspin to listen to!
When I first heard Portuguese I thought it was Russian, but then I heard more words, then I thought it was kinda Spanish-like. I think it helps if you pretend you don't know Russian or Spanish. So you don't think of the words, just the overall sound. There can be similarities even if they are coincidental (false friends?). So we have to get down to the phonemes I think is the term. I hear a lot of ж sound in Russian and Portuguese. So that was the first kind of similarities I heard. And yes I am learning Russian and Spanish now. Also I have studied IPA/linguistics.
I'm a native european portuguese. In my experience, from all the immigrants in Portugal who learn Portuguese as a second language, the ones coming from Eastern Europe are the ones who most resemble a native portuguese speaker. Sometimes, I can't even tell for sure whether the person is native or nor, whereas for all other immigrants it normally just takes a few words to immediately realize that he/she is not native. But Eastern Europeans are usually more difficult to detect this. It's as if our sounds are natural for them and they can learn it more easily and more accurately.
Yes. I have an ucranian friend that I didn't realized she wasn't a native until I asked her family name. And I have been mistook as Russian while visiting Germany.
I'm from Brazil and I can attest to the same thing. I have personally met 4 Russians living here and all 4 of them spoke perfect Portuguese with almost no accent. Now I know 4 people is a pretty small sample size, but I'm still thoroughly convinced that slavs are the best foreigners at speaking Portuguese, even more so than spanish speakers who usually have a noticeable foreign accent.
@@guilhermecosta5171 Off-topic, but your comment reminded me of a funny story. I met a spanish person living here in Portugal for many years, he learned and spoke portuguese correctly and he really made an effort, but even after many years he couldn't lose the spanish accent. At his first words, everyone could immediately tell he was spanish. One day he was at a shop and the attendant asked him "how can it be that you're here for so many years and you still can't speak portuguese?". For a portuguese, when a spanish person speaks portuguese with a spanish accent, it's almost as if he's simply speaking spanish. He was so frustrated that he told me after that he never tried to speak portuguese again, he just spoke spanish. After all, for our ears, it was almost the same. :-)
@@arturrosa3166 lol that reminds me of one the professors in my university who is Peruvian and still has a heavy accent, despite having lived here in Brazil for decades. Sometimes he even says some spanish words in the middle of his sentences, like he'll often say "entonces" instead of "então". I feel like it's because our vocabularies are so similar that spanish speakers feel more tempted to pronounce stuff like in their language. They also need to make less of an effort to be understood by us than other foreigners.
I speak Portuguese with a south Brazilian accent, and European Portuguese is impossible for me. Last week I was with the wife at the pool and had a hard time guessing if someone was European Portuguese or Russian. Ukrainian fiancée had to tell me it was Russian, and she had a hard time as well.
One thing is certain Slavic people learn Portuguese easier than other countries. We've a lot of people from Russia, Ucrain, Latvia, etc here in Portugal, and they learn Portuguese fast
@@hugomlpaixao They literally have around 50% russian minority, who are considered latvians as they have citizenship. Also nobody claimed that Latvian natives are slavic. You need to learn how to read.
@@hugomlpaixao Actually Lithuaian and Latvian are categorized in the braoder balto-slavic language group... so they are more simlar to each other that to example to Spanish or German. And hundreds of years of intermixing also contributed to loan words etc.
The most funny thing about this video is that to me, as a Portuguese, you sound like a Portuguese speaking English (a good speaker, don’t worry)! And your pronunciation of Portuguese words is most times almost perfect. So I guess the guy is right after all... 😂
I'm a native Portuguese(european) speaker, and I know Russian also because I am from Moldova, and never thought that they are similar or sound similar. But now I can see the similarities. This is very weird for me right now.
Native portuguese married to native Russian-speaking wife , yeah, it sounds similar. Except half of your vowels have a Y before it. YI, YE, YA, etc. There have been many funny moments when a standard portuguese word sounded like something naughty in Russian haha.
I speak Polish natively, Russian to some extent (grocery shopping level, not poetry reading level). One time I sat on a train and two guys in front of me were speaking this weird language that I couldn't quite grasp (and they were talking rather quietly, while the train was loud). "It's Russian! No, but this sound weirdly Spanish! Now it sound Russian again!" Then the ticket control came and they pulled their Portuguese passports. I have to admit I was quite shocked.
Same situation here Pole that knows some Russian. I just searched for some Portugeese video and i have to say i really does sound simillar to russian. Yeah i know they are not speaking it, but they both sound very soft. But not all the time likes sometimes it sounds similar to Russsian and sometimes completly diffrent, like some wast european language. Very strange expierience.
I speak português (Brazilian) and I have Russian friends. A lot of times I hear her speaking and there are some words that sound like Portuguese. The biggest thing for me is that I can tell when someone is Brazilian speaking in English due to their accent. Whenever I’m wrong they are Russian. Both Brazilian and Russians English accents sound the same. Crazy! I know
@@Daniel-wx3qn you could try to see some Portuguese series or movies, or listen to Portuguese music - The more exposure you get to a language the better you understand it - Here in Portugal we understand perfectly the Brazilian Portuguese, when you guys speak slower and without using slang. We've had years of exposure to Brazilian Portuguese, thanks to the novelas and music
I was once in a bus in Montréal speaking Brazilian Portuguese to some friends I was with and an older gentleman overhearing us asked us if we were speaking Russian. It was the first time I was introduced to the idea that the two languages could sound similar to people who speak none of the two.
I’m a native Brazilian Portuguese speaker. In 2011 I was 14 and living in the US I had a Russian friend and one day I realized that when he spoke Russian it sounded like gibberish Portuguese to me. Ever since then I’ve noticed that Portuguese and Russian sound like gibberish to each other
I’m Brazilian and I really don’t know if the languages sounds similar, BUT when Russian people speak English, for example, and us Brazilian speak English the accents sound very similar.
@@Oxnation not always, sometimes brazillians pronounce the letter R as hard as russians do. we [brazillians] often pronounce it as an H when R is the first letter of the word.
@@lucasBarjas I only met Portuguese who speak English[and only one Brazilian], and non of them had hard R pronunciation. Russians always. Can you give example ?
As a native portuguese, I noticed that in movies, when they had a russian character speaking in the background, it sounded like portuguese. Sometimes i really had to pay attention to realize that they weren't, in fact, speaking EP. The english accent of russians is also very similar to the accent of a portuguese english accent.
Its because of the phonetics of the russian. As the videos of Lanhfocus states, some sounds are similar, which makes for russian to learn portuguese easy, and for portuguese to learn russian easily. but theres more: did you know that there'sd a language out there that both a russian and a portuguese can learn with the same ease? its the romanian language. It IS a romance language (Much like portuguese is) but got heavily influenced by slavic languages
Loved the video. I’m a Portuguese from Portugal who speaks a fare bit of Russian and really don’t see the similarity 😂🤷♂️ your pronunciation of “eles” e “felizmente” is amazing!!! 👏👏👏👏
Hey vlad, love from Brazil, I`m a native Portuguese speaker and I just started learning Russian recently and found out that there are many words that sound very similar if not almost identical in the way we pronounce then, and they also share similar or the same meaning, maybe showing some of these words could be a great ideia for a video!
Удачи в изучении русского языка! Это сложно, но интересно. Обязательно приезжай в Россию. Desejo-lhe boa sorte em aprender russo! A língua russa é complexa, mas interessante. Não se esqueça de vir para a Rússia. 😍
Ахахах! Русский "сложный язык". Это хорошая шутка. 6-9 месяцев, и человек может почти бегло говорить по-русски. Не такое "обязательно ездить в Россию". Чего, если много людей в России не правильно говорят на русском? Боже.
But Brazilian Portuguese doesn't have the characteristics cited in that video. Brazilian Portuguese is syllable-timed, we don't reduce the vowels the way they do in EP.
@@helcium_nz you are wrong. There are several dialects in Brazil, there isn’t only ONE Brazilian Portuguese. I am a pilot, I travel, and I’m Brazilian and I’ve been asked many times if I was speaking Russian.
I am a native Mexican Spanish speaker and to my ear Spanish and Portuguese sound remarkably similar but Portuguese has an accent that is more nasal. That may be what people hear when they find similar sounds to Slavic languages.
I'm from Portugal and there any some 30.000 immigrants from UKraine in my country, and most of them can speak perfect portuguese without any accent just for living 3-4 years in Portugal. Maybe bacause the sounds of portugueses are familiar to them and they can easly reproduce
My mom is a fluent spanish speaker from central america and she overheard some people speaking what she thought was spanish, she asked them directions in spanish and they had to take a second to process it. turns out it they were speaking italian lol
@@HeadbangerPars I think between those three languages, people from portuguese speaking countries, spanish and italian as well, can understand the basics without learning the languages!
I'm only now, when the word всплеск (vsplesk/splash) is written in Latin letters, understanding , that the words sound perfectly different, but they have something in common... Hmmmm... Interesting
I speak neither Portuguese nor Russian but I have often felt they sound similar. How? I guess to me they both sound "soft" and FULL of the kind of shushing sound zh, zh, zh and with few vowels. Interestingly I do speak Spanish and it's so clear in writing that that Spanish and Portuguese are closely related, so much that you can grasp a good deal of the meaning, still it's hard for me to pick out the meaning of Portuguese when spoken. Anyways. I think both those languages are beautiful.
There's a brazilian-russian couple that have a youtube channel called Wally e Dasha. The woman is russian and her accent in portuguese is perfect. I think it have to do with the similar sounds in both languages
The most curious think in this video: the guy promounces the words in portuguese perfectly. It's impressive. He sounds like a portuguese guy. (I am from Brazil)
The devoicing of муж only happens when the ж is at the end of the word or syllable, so when you add a suffix, like мужем, the consonant is voiced back, especially due to the presence of the vowel е.
I am from Portugal, and I can say that the people from Lisbon (capital of portugal) tend to shorten the vogals a lot more than the people from other regions, but we all do it a bit, you know, accents...
I'm Romanian - living in the East, close to the border, in Moldavia. Our dialect includes sounds that are similar to Russian and Portuguese, but it's still Romanian. In 1992 I spent two weeks in Wales. Our host used to listen to the radio and one day he found a Russian channel. Hearing Russian in Wales, all of a sudden, was so unexpected that we laughed a little. Our host asked, "What are they saying? On the radio." We shrugged. "No idea." "What?! Don't you speak Russian?" "No." He had been under the impression that Romanian was a Russian dialect. (!!!) Ok, we say "da", but even in this case the pronunciation is slightly different. In Russian, d is softer, warmer, and the a is somewhat longer. In Romanian, "da" is crisp. There are some clear influences - in terms of sounds and vocabulary - from Slavic languages, but Romanian is not a dialect of Russian.
I am a portuguese national and when I worked with russians and ucranians , when they spoke among themselfs ,from a distance ,I had to tell myself that it was not portugues.,like the general noise was really familiar somehow .
I'm Portuguese and when I travel people think I speak Romanian or Polish... I don't get a lot of Russian. Something to note, we have a lot of Polish and Ukrainian immigrants and they pick up the language really fast and they don't have a hard time pronouncing Portuguese words (normally people struggle with Portuguese). Even you in the video pronounced the words really well :)
My first language is Portuguese (from Brazil). When I hear a Slavic language from a distance, or say, in a noisy caffe, the phonetics are indeed similar to Portuguese. Also, a Polish person heard me speaking Portuguese and she told me I sounded Polish! I find these similarities really interesting. 🌻
"Shwa" is a neutral, open sound in IPA (international phonetic language), that is a tool to write down most of world's languages phonetically - how they sound like. It is not concerned with spelling, only with the pronunciation of the words. When it comes to Russian and Polish, i find IPA to be not ideal at best (classical singer here, trained in IPA, Polish native). Shwa is a bit similar to Polish vowel "y", but lighter and not as much in throat. If you know any French, shwa is the sound commonly found on the ends of words, for example "lune" - the "e" is not a full pronounced E, but rather a neutral, difficult to describe sound.
My experience is that how schwa sounds really depends on the language that has it. The main thing is that it is a reduced unstressed vowel that is also central. The reason for this variance is that the central space is the biggest in the whole of the vowel space and also that vowels in the surrounding syllables of the word tend to influence schwa's simply because the tongue doesn't have to move as much. But yes, the definition of schwa in English is far too broad for my Danish ears, especially when 'a' at the beginning of words is concerned (like 'about'). The reason is that it sounds a lot like one of our stressed vowels, but that vowel doesn't exist in English phonology, so it's perceived as a schwa. But yes, I think the future of describing vowel sounds in linguistics is brightening because more people who have native experience can choose which vowel symbols or cardinal vowels best describe the actual vowels. I think there is potential and perhaps a need for more schwa sound symbols to be made. Anyway, I'll stop here. This is the sort of stuff I'm writing about in my bachelor's thesis so I can get a little carried away xD
@@rasmusn.e.m1064 I agree it depends heavily on language, but so does every other sound. Open Polish vowels are nowhere near open French vowels in terms of 'opennes', yet they are open anyway. Polish and French nasals are completely different, yet described by the same symbols. That's one of the reasons why I find the IPA to be not ideal at most, because if you have no idea about a language, from IPA you'd get an approximation of pronunciation, enough to be understood but quite far off from the native sounds.
@@rasmusn.e.m1064 also in French schwa and other neutral sounds are heavily dependant on the preceeding or following vowel, adjusting into more closed or open sounds to match the vowel in question (at least according to my French teacher), so schwa can have a lot of slightly different sounds overall
@@AnnaEmilka Very interesting to read about your experiences with Polish and French! I agree that the IPA can be misleading in its broadest application (ie. without diacritics) because you can easily describe completely different phonological phenomena with the same symbols just because they happen to overlap phonetically or vice versa. I think IPA in its narrow application is actually quite decent at describing the nuances of speech sounds, even though it is biased in fx how it does not represent the tense vs lax contrast very well. As far as I am aware, Polish nasal vowels are basically slightly nasalised vowels followed by a velar nasal. Is that correct? That's what I have seen it described as in IPA and it is not the way French nasal vowels are typically represented. I guess the reason it's still called nasal vowels is for historical reasons. -I believe Proto-Slavic had nasal vowels as well.
Once I was on a train in Italy and heard two Brazilian girls talking (I'm br), but I could not recognize their accent even when I was paying attention to them. It took like one whole minute to realize they were Russians, not brs.
There's a big Ukrainian community in Portugal and it's impressive how good they speak, in general, after only one year, specially accent wise. Btw, your "felizmente" was really spot on! Great video!
I am a native Polish speaker. I admit that many years ago before I've seen these video, at many occasion I rode a public bus in an american city, noticing passengers around me talking among themselves in a language I first recognized as Polish. But when I approached them closer it appeared they were either Brazilian, Portuguese, Cape Verdeans, Azoreans. It happened many times.
I'm a native Ukrainian and Russian speaker and this has ALWAYS been something I've noticed as I've interacted with many other immigrants, and I'm often trying to understand different slavic languages. Then I heard Portuguese and I'm like, wtf, why does this sound so familiar even though it's totally different? As he describes, it's a much stronger effect if you're not completely paying attention or have some distance from the speaker. For decades I didn't understand why such different languages could ever sound similar, but even today when I hear Portuguese, my Ukrainian and Russian language brain takes about 1.5 sentences to realize it's not intelligible.
For Information The Portugues word PÃO (Bread) is what gave the Japanese Word for Bread (PAN パン ) Greeting FROM MAGHREB, MAROKKO MARROKO MARRUECOS MOROCCO, (WHAT EVER YOU CHOOSE)
I don't know if Portuguese sounds like Russian or Polish, but when I speak Portuguese in front of people who have never heard the European dialect of Portuguese, many ask me why I'm speaking Russian.
You prounouced PT-PT words VERY accurately. Almost any person who don't speak Portugal's Portuguese (Yes, "European Portuguese" concept sucks tbh) can't prounouce as good (excelent) as you. You just nailed it perfectly!!!!
12:32 that's beautiful. love when you discover, or see other people discover, the allophony in your language that you don't think about, but that's exactly why it's allophonic. 13:06 also (and I don't speak Russian) if that sentence uses the word му́жем (or whatever the proper spelling is), then the ж isn't at the end of the word anymore, which is why you're be pronouncing it as voiced. basically, its normally voiceless in муж and voiced му́жем.
I'm a native portuguese speaker from Portugal and i honestly never thought russian and portuguese sounded alike. But when you said some of the portuguese words, they sounded really like an actual portuguese, more than if an english speaker tried to pronounce those words.
I was in Portugal for vacation in 2019 and it sounds like Polish from longer distance, it's truth. I would not say Russian, but Polish. It's full of ŠŽ sounds, everything is softened. But you must hear it from longer distance, from close distance you ofcourse know it's not Polish. I think schwa is something not pronounced clearly or 2 sounds mixed together if I understand it correctly, we don't have such thing in Czech, but someone said that Y on end of word in Polish is schwa after I said they pronouncing it like combination of Y and E. As a Czech, I can clearly hear that when Polish person says "dobry" there is not clear Y, it's more like Y+E together which was very confusing for me when I was in Poland, I didn't know if I should saying dzień dobry or dzień dobre, after some time in Poland I started saying it somewhere between because that's how I hear that from native speakers. D/ T and S/Z or Š/Ž are very often swaped in slavic langauges, it's not schwa, it's just about what is easier to pronounc, try to say muž really with ž, it's not easy, say muš is much more easy, same like votka, not vodka, you just can't say vodka really with D, that's why it's pronounced with T. In Russian you can say MUŽ because of their accent makes word longer, in Czech we can't say MUŽ, you would have to say separately MU and Ž. But most importantly, we don't use word muž much often in spoken language. LH in Portuguese sounds like Slovak softened L to me, as a Czech, I can't pronounce that.
I lived in Czechia for two years and learned Czech. Then when I was in Milan one day I heard a group speaking and I asked them if they spoke Czech. I was embarrassed when they said 'no we are from Brazil.
13:37 - In polish, last consonants also become voiceless. f.e. Lekarz (Cyrillic script: Льэкаж), would become Lekasz (Cyrillic script: Льэкаш). The same thing happens to "муж". You just don't realise it when you normally speak.
I was learning Portuguese at some point, and mistakenly a TV commentator (football match) speaking Portuguese - it was actually Russian!. That was the time I realized these two languages can be mistaken by non-natives. * Yes, certain languages SOUND like certain other languages TO THE EARS OF NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS when they were spoken faster. It's obviously NOT to the ears of native speakers.
There is some words in Russian and Portuguese that are similar and basically are pronounced the same way. Like leader for example. Also both languages are harsh and loud languages.
About муж : I think the main point is that, when you speak fast, it tends to become voiceless, if it's at the end of the word. In the sentence you say at 13:06, I think you say мужем, and in this case, the ж isn't at the end of the word, so it stays voiced. Don't worry, though, it's hard to analyze our own language; I've often tried to analyze how I pronounce things only to then become self-conscious about it and being unsure of what I actually do when I don't think about it lol
yeah, when I was editing I realized that it wasn't fait to compare муж и мужем. Also, I agree about your own language. People ask me way to much how to learn Russian. How tf I know lol
portuguese is my second second language and I do find a lot of similarities in the sound. sometimes people are speaking Russian or Ukrainian and it sounds like portuguese from afar somehow. also your pronunciation on the portuguese words were actually really really good!
One major thing that you are forgetting. From Portugal many people were kicked out of there in the 16th century. They were told become catholic or leave the country. Many people said they became catholic but really didn’t. My family was part of that. I am Jewish, and some of my family didn’t wish to stop being Jew. Thus many people back then moved to Poland, Ukraine and Russia. That is partly why Russian sounds like Polish/Russian.
Fun fact: I've met people from Ukraine and Moldova in Portugal, and it's fascinating how quickly you guys pick up Portuguese! I also know an Ukranian I work with in Toronto, that used to live in Portugal for many years and speaks Portuguese fluently. Not that common to see that in Toronto :)
This topic is very common and it makes sense. This is very accurate its just a matter of sounds but the vocabulary is completly diferent. Portuguese basicly have every type of sounds thats why portuguese people learn foreign languages easily. One i hear all the time is that portuguese sounds like a mix of polisch and german.
I'm Portuguese and Russian is in no way shape or form near Portuguese in any aspect except that both languages like others (german for example) are spoken from the throat, still curious as to how a slav might think about this... btw 13:00 when U say husband in Russian a Portuguese speaker is hearing the Portuguese word MUGE which means MOO (from a cow)
To me, Russian soft consonants sound like there's a slight "i" after the consonant. But now that I saw this video, yeah, totally sounds like Portuguese "nh", "lh" and so on. Btw, Tom Scott also has made some interesting videos on language, and here's one if you wanna know more about "schwa": th-cam.com/video/qu4zyRqILYM/w-d-xo.html
as a native portuguese, I can confirm that russian sounds a lot like portuguese at a distance, I discovered this while playing cyberpunk where I was listening to a conversation between 2 npc and was like, "wtf is that portuguese from portugal?" but it was russian
I am Brazilian and some years ago I have heard a mother talking to her daughter in a ´misterious` Slavic language. For my suprise, she was talking in European Portuguese and I remarked this after some time...
As a Brazilian, I’m baffled! I also couldn’t hear any resemblance between them before the video. It would be cool if you had a Portuguese speaker (European or Brazilian) to break down how Portuguese is pronounced to you, like you’re doing with Russian. Great video!
This is funny because I just recently saw some videos of a russian woman who immigrated to Brazil and is learning portuguese, She aways says that 'my portuguese isn't good' but can read and speak quite well for a person that is only learning a language for a year
I am Portuguese and when I went to France with my sister the wife of a Polish man asked if we were Polish while we were shopping. We don't think of the similarities of the languages because we are used to earing them but watching how easily you could say tenho and trabalho shows that those similarities makes it easier to pronouce. I can't make French speakers say BACALHAU correctly instead of BACALAU even at gunpoint hahaha
when you in 13th minute use the example "mužem" you have "e" after "ž", but when you say muž.... because it is in the end it can turn turn to "š", it is in a free position, as apposed to mužem... the "shwa" sound is a phonethic terminology, that is hoe anx language can be transcribed, so if you can read phonethic alphabet you could in theory read sth. perfectlx without understanding a word
as a Polish, Portuguese doesn't sound Polish to me, maybe a bit Slavic (like mix of every slavic) , but it sound like they are "singing" and some of the words sounds "prolonged" like they are loooong usually at the eeeeend. I work with people from Portugal and i feel like they have a lot of "Sz(ш), Ś ( щ), ż (ж)" sounds.
I'm a portuguese native speaker, and a few years ago i did erasmus in Poland. It happened to me, a lot of times, to hear polish speakers and think it was portuguese, but, as you said, only when the person was too far for it to be understood or when i wasn't paying attention to what the person was saying. But only on a fonetic sense, the vocabulary as nothing to do with one another.
My guess is with the /ə/ he's referring to how a word is spoken versus written in a language. The schwa comes from the International Phonetic Alphabet. It is a vowel that is produced in the middle of the kids the and requires the least effort so it becomes a common pronunciation in many words despite the lack of a letter for it in many languages. For example, in the word definite, it is pronounced in american English as "defin-uh-t". In the root worse "finite" both 'i's have short vowel sounds like in the word "igloo". However, "def" is stressed in the word definite, so the 'i' becomes reduce to the /ə/ (which sounds like 'uh' sort of). And this rule applies to many languy outside of English. There's a wonderfully really short vid by Tom Scott on /ə/ on TH-cam titled - "ə: The Most Coming Vowel in English". And again this is just me deducting, idk for sure what the guy ment in the video. TL;DR the /ə/ refers the vowel pronunciation when SPOKEN, not just straightforward spelling
It's funny because Russian people find it easier to learn Portuguese than people of other nationalities like English. At least that's what my aunt, a Portuguese teacher, says. I hope that one day you can come to Portugal to find out for yourself. A hug from Portugal 🇵🇹
Hey Vlad. The reason you think you disagree with him on the pronunciation of "муж" is because when you put a grammatical ending on the word, like how you said "мужем", the vowel that's now following the ж is a voiced sound and therefore throws the ж back into being voiced. In other words, the ж only stays pronounced like ш when there's no sound immediately following it or another unvoiced sound.
Just to let you know, a schwa is a neutral sound, like when your mouth is relaxed. It changes slightly depending on the sounds before or after, but more or less sounds like an "ah" when alone.
I am portuguese from Lisbon. A couple of months ago i was zapping on tv and ended on a channel i first thought was a portuguese one. I paid attention for some minutes, thinking what new channel is this? And then i realised that i wasnt understanding a single word of that "portuguese". I was wathing a BULGARIAN channel !!! It sounded just like portuguese! 😂🤣😂😂
Thanks for this, it was very interesting. I speak Spanish (as a second language) and I've always thought that Portuguese sounds like a Russian speaking Spanish because the words are similar to Spanish but the sound of the language is more similar to Slavic languages.
Once I was abroad in the back of an Uber with a friend and he was talking Portuguese on the phone with his mother and then when we asked the Uber driver something in English he said "yes" in Russian. We were so confused lmao
Yes, that's true. I'm portuguese working together with foreigners for more than 30 years and i realized that that confusion between portuguese and slavic languages is because we use a lot of "sh" sounds. In portuguese all the words ending with "s" have the "sh" sound. Also all the "s" before a consonant sounds "sh". I also speak bulgarian and i can identify the similarities, but you need to be able to distantiate yourself from your own language.
Ha ha, when I heard despresar's pronunciation I was like "yeah, that sounds like something that could be Polish, but not Russian". We're psheki afterall ;)
Well, I'm from Brazil, therefore I'm a brazilian portuguese speaker - and sometimes I consider particularly hard to understand perfectly european portuguese (and thats because european portuguese is a stressed timed lenguage while brazilian portuguese syllable-timed). So, with a little bit of goodwill (lol) I can see why some people think european portuguese may sound like russian. As a matter of fact, last years I was tripping around Rome with some brazilian friends and, of course, we were speaking portuguese when a russian girl (at least I think she was russian lol) who was passing thru heared us and asked: - Russian? And we answered: - No, we are brazilians. And she: - Oh, ok, sorry....
Faz todo sentido eles serem stressed timed e nós sillable timed. Quando estive em Portugal me pareceu que a dicção deles é diferente. Tanto pelo ritmo de fala quanto por comerem vogais das sílabas átonas. Enquanto nós tendemos a pronunciar todas as letras tanto das sílabas tônicas quanto das sílabas átonas. Aprendi algo hoje. Kkkkkk
![Why does Portuguese sound like Russian? [English subtitles]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/cKrZg9HqVYU/mqdefault.jpg)
![Why does Portuguese sound like Russian? [English subtitles]](/img/tr.png)
How similar do you find these languages?
I don't find the languages all that similar when the differences are broken down the way they are but then this video has me geared to hear the differences when I wouldn't be listening for it in the wild so to speak. My mother (who is from Iran) never taught me fluent Farsi but I can understand very basic conversations (enough to tell what the gist of what someone is saying) and when I first heard someone speaking what I think was Dari (a language from Afghan) it sounded just like Farsi but I couldn't pull any words out that I understood and it threw me for a loop.
My father also told me how he played a joke on my mother once by playing a song sung by an Afghani singer and my mother was confused because it sounded like Farsi but she couldn't understand anything. My father teased her by saying that maybe she had been in the U.S. for too long.
Of course this may not be a fair comparison because supposedly the language they speak in Afghanistan is closer to the original Persian than modern day Farsi spoken in Iran. Again, supposedly when they were trying to resurrect the original Persian in Iran after it having been supplanted by Arabic they used the language spoken in Afghanistan as a model (sorry if my understanding of how they brought Farsi *back* to Iran is a bit muddled but I'm relaying what my mother told me and haven't done research on it).
I do. I speak French from Canada and some of the sounds we have are close to those of Russian and even more to those of Portuguese, since French and Portuguese are Romance languages. In fact, I could be hearing Portuguese through a wall and think people in the other room spoke French. I has to do with the fact that we use lots of nasal sounds. I talked about the similarities in pronunctiation between Russian and the French-Canadian accent to a coworker from Moldova and she was impressed of how noticeable it was. We remove vowels and the result is a succession of consonnants. For exemple, spasiba can be said with the exact same pronunction as we would say "it's not that low" (c'pas si bas : ce n'est pas si bas).
It's almost as if the cold from both places froze our jaw and slurred our speech.
I definitely do not hear Portuguese and think it is similar to Russian. I also think it depends if a Speaker is Using The "Received Pronunciation" of Their Language and not The "Casual Pronunciation".
:)
I had honestly never heard European Portuguese before! Brazilian Portugese definitely doesn't sound similar, but yes I do find that European Portuguese does sound like a very slavic Spanish. I don't speak Portuguese or any Slavic language, but I do speak Spanish and it was a bit of a headspin to listen to!
When I first heard Portuguese I thought it was Russian, but then I heard more words, then I thought it was kinda Spanish-like. I think it helps if you pretend you don't know Russian or Spanish. So you don't think of the words, just the overall sound. There can be similarities even if they are coincidental (false friends?). So we have to get down to the phonemes I think is the term. I hear a lot of ж sound in Russian and Portuguese. So that was the first kind of similarities I heard. And yes I am learning Russian and Spanish now. Also I have studied IPA/linguistics.
I'm a native european portuguese. In my experience, from all the immigrants in Portugal who learn Portuguese as a second language, the ones coming from Eastern Europe are the ones who most resemble a native portuguese speaker. Sometimes, I can't even tell for sure whether the person is native or nor, whereas for all other immigrants it normally just takes a few words to immediately realize that he/she is not native. But Eastern Europeans are usually more difficult to detect this. It's as if our sounds are natural for them and they can learn it more easily and more accurately.
Yes. I have an ucranian friend that I didn't realized she wasn't a native until I asked her family name. And I have been mistook as Russian while visiting Germany.
I'm from Brazil and I can attest to the same thing. I have personally met 4 Russians living here and all 4 of them spoke perfect Portuguese with almost no accent. Now I know 4 people is a pretty small sample size, but I'm still thoroughly convinced that slavs are the best foreigners at speaking Portuguese, even more so than spanish speakers who usually have a noticeable foreign accent.
@@guilhermecosta5171 Off-topic, but your comment reminded me of a funny story. I met a spanish person living here in Portugal for many years, he learned and spoke portuguese correctly and he really made an effort, but even after many years he couldn't lose the spanish accent. At his first words, everyone could immediately tell he was spanish. One day he was at a shop and the attendant asked him "how can it be that you're here for so many years and you still can't speak portuguese?". For a portuguese, when a spanish person speaks portuguese with a spanish accent, it's almost as if he's simply speaking spanish. He was so frustrated that he told me after that he never tried to speak portuguese again, he just spoke spanish. After all, for our ears, it was almost the same. :-)
@@arturrosa3166 lol that reminds me of one the professors in my university who is Peruvian and still has a heavy accent, despite having lived here in Brazil for decades. Sometimes he even says some spanish words in the middle of his sentences, like he'll often say "entonces" instead of "então". I feel like it's because our vocabularies are so similar that spanish speakers feel more tempted to pronounce stuff like in their language. They also need to make less of an effort to be understood by us than other foreigners.
I speak Portuguese with a south Brazilian accent, and European Portuguese is impossible for me. Last week I was with the wife at the pool and had a hard time guessing if someone was European Portuguese or Russian. Ukrainian fiancée had to tell me it was Russian, and she had a hard time as well.
When you said "felizmente" PERFECTLY my european portuguese self was So happy!! That was so awesome!
PTBR be like: "estou fumando um cigarro"
PTEU be like: "shtou a f'mar un cigaro"
@@Sv4NNe Depende da região
@@Dereksunny08 Porto? Lisboa?
@@Sv4NNe Hm, não. Eu diria mais alentejo, na forma que escreves-te
@@Dereksunny08 ahhahaha
One thing is certain Slavic people learn Portuguese easier than other countries. We've a lot of people from Russia, Ucrain, Latvia, etc here in Portugal, and they learn Portuguese fast
Latvian isn't a slavic language tho
@@hugomlpaixao Close to 50% of latvians speak russian as first language and the rest learn it at school.
@@Notmyname1593 still. Latvians aren't slavic. Most of them speak Russian because they were part of the USSR
@@hugomlpaixao They literally have around 50% russian minority, who are considered latvians as they have citizenship.
Also nobody claimed that Latvian natives are slavic. You need to learn how to read.
@@hugomlpaixao Actually Lithuaian and Latvian are categorized in the braoder balto-slavic language group... so they are more simlar to each other that to example to Spanish or German. And hundreds of years of intermixing also contributed to loan words etc.
The most funny thing about this video is that to me, as a Portuguese, you sound like a Portuguese speaking English (a good speaker, don’t worry)! And your pronunciation of Portuguese words is most times almost perfect. So I guess the guy is right after all... 😂
I am Portuguese and the amount of times I've been called Russian while speaking either portuguese or english is in the hundreds.
I heard that I sound slavic when speaking in english too lmao curse of the portuguese accent
Eu de polaca bruh
I'm a native Portuguese(european) speaker, and I know Russian also because I am from Moldova, and never thought that they are similar or sound similar. But now I can see the similarities. This is very weird for me right now.
Seamănă și cu româna destul de mult
Native portuguese from Moldova...
@@MarcinHRN second generation migrant. When to school with a few of them.
Native portuguese married to native Russian-speaking wife , yeah, it sounds similar. Except half of your vowels have a Y before it. YI, YE, YA, etc.
There have been many funny moments when a standard portuguese word sounded like something naughty in Russian haha.
Que palavras "standard" soam maroto em Russo? Só por curiosidade.
I speak Polish natively, Russian to some extent (grocery shopping level, not poetry reading level). One time I sat on a train and two guys in front of me were speaking this weird language that I couldn't quite grasp (and they were talking rather quietly, while the train was loud). "It's Russian! No, but this sound weirdly Spanish! Now it sound Russian again!" Then the ticket control came and they pulled their Portuguese passports. I have to admit I was quite shocked.
Same situation here Pole that knows some Russian. I just searched for some Portugeese video and i have to say i really does sound simillar to russian. Yeah i know they are not speaking it, but they both sound very soft. But not all the time likes sometimes it sounds similar to Russsian and sometimes completly diffrent, like some wast european language. Very strange expierience.
@Luiz Nunes 😴😴😴
If they were two guy's making out or two sluty girls with their boobs out and on miniskirts you could be sure they were Brazilian...
@@sandrocosta479 Auch!
@Luiz Nunes se lhe tivessem pedido a carteira já saberíamos donde eram tbm
As a portuguese person who loves your videos and is learning russian, this video made me very happy, keep up the good work!!
Thanks
I am brazilian and agree 100% with you!!
I speak português (Brazilian) and I have Russian friends. A lot of times I hear her speaking and there are some words that sound like Portuguese. The biggest thing for me is that I can tell when someone is Brazilian speaking in English due to their accent. Whenever I’m wrong they are Russian. Both Brazilian and Russians English accents sound the same. Crazy! I know
when he tries to repeat the words in Portuguese in the video he speaks perfectly. i'm portuguese, so i can confirm.
It's funny because as a Brazilian I can't understand his Portuguese pronunciation lol
@@Daniel-wx3qn low iq
@@Daniel-wx3qn you could try to see some Portuguese series or movies, or listen to Portuguese music
- The more exposure you get to a language the better you understand it
- Here in Portugal we understand perfectly the Brazilian Portuguese, when you guys speak slower and without using slang. We've had years of exposure to Brazilian Portuguese, thanks to the novelas and music
@@tatianaoliveira2191 vivi 2 anos em Viseu e gosto muito do Amor Electro rs
@@Daniel-wx3qn Adoro os Amor Electro
I was once in a bus in Montréal speaking Brazilian Portuguese to some friends I was with and an older gentleman overhearing us asked us if we were speaking Russian. It was the first time I was introduced to the idea that the two languages could sound similar to people who speak none of the two.
I’m a native Brazilian Portuguese speaker. In 2011 I was 14 and living in the US I had a Russian friend and one day I realized that when he spoke Russian it sounded like gibberish Portuguese to me. Ever since then I’ve noticed that Portuguese and Russian sound like gibberish to each other
I’m Brazilian and I really don’t know if the languages sounds similar, BUT when Russian people speak English, for example, and us Brazilian speak English the accents sound very similar.
Nem por isso bro
@@joaoaoj100 Russians have hard accents speaking English, especially with Hard R sound. While Portuguese have R sound similar to H.
@@Oxnation not always, sometimes brazillians pronounce the letter R as hard as russians do. we [brazillians] often pronounce it as an H when R is the first letter of the word.
@@lucasBarjas I only met Portuguese who speak English[and only one Brazilian], and non of them had hard R pronunciation.
Russians always.
Can you give example ?
@@Oxnation Rare and red are pronounced as Hare and Hed.
As a native portuguese, I noticed that in movies, when they had a russian character speaking in the background, it sounded like portuguese. Sometimes i really had to pay attention to realize that they weren't, in fact, speaking EP. The english accent of russians is also very similar to the accent of a portuguese english accent.
As a Brazilian person, I gotta admit your pronunciation is high-key likewise any of my lusophone comrades'
Its because of the phonetics of the russian. As the videos of Lanhfocus states, some sounds are similar, which makes for russian to learn portuguese easy, and for portuguese to learn russian easily. but theres more: did you know that there'sd a language out there that both a russian and a portuguese can learn with the same ease? its the romanian language. It IS a romance language (Much like portuguese is) but got heavily influenced by slavic languages
Loved the video. I’m a Portuguese from Portugal who speaks a fare bit of Russian and really don’t see the similarity 😂🤷♂️ your pronunciation of “eles” e “felizmente” is amazing!!! 👏👏👏👏
Hey vlad, love from Brazil, I`m a native Portuguese speaker and I just started learning Russian recently and found out that there are many words that sound very similar if not almost identical in the way we pronounce then, and they also share similar or the same meaning, maybe showing some of these words could be a great ideia for a video!
Удачи в изучении русского языка! Это сложно, но интересно. Обязательно приезжай в Россию.
Desejo-lhe boa sorte em aprender russo! A língua russa é complexa, mas interessante. Não se esqueça de vir para a Rússia.
😍
Tbm percebi que a pronúncia é mais fácil, que por exemplo o inglês
Ахахах! Русский "сложный язык". Это хорошая шутка. 6-9 месяцев, и человек может почти бегло говорить по-русски.
Не такое "обязательно ездить в Россию". Чего, если много людей в России не правильно говорят на русском? Боже.
@@pedroalvaro7090 ну, по Вам всё понятно...
I’m Brazilian. I was shocked how perfectly you pronounced the word "felizmente". To my Brazilian ears, it sounded like a real Portuguese.
My cousin who is Brazilian was speaking on the phone in Portuguese while traveling through Poland and she was told not to speak Russian in Poland
But Brazilian Portuguese doesn't have the characteristics cited in that video.
Brazilian Portuguese is syllable-timed, we don't reduce the vowels the way they do in EP.
@@helcium_nz tem hora que eu mesmo confuso russo com português se eu não estou prestando atenção. Eu falo os dois
@@helcium_nz Brazilians try to deny it, but they get called Russian too😂
where did they said so in Warsaw?
@@helcium_nz you are wrong. There are several dialects in Brazil, there isn’t only ONE Brazilian Portuguese. I am a pilot, I travel, and I’m Brazilian and I’ve been asked many times if I was speaking Russian.
You have a good Portuguese accent when you read the words he presents.
I am a native Mexican Spanish speaker and to my ear Spanish and Portuguese sound remarkably similar but Portuguese has an accent that is more nasal. That may be what people hear when they find similar sounds to Slavic languages.
I'm from Portugal and there any some 30.000 immigrants from UKraine in my country, and most of them can speak perfect portuguese without any accent just for living 3-4 years in Portugal. Maybe bacause the sounds of portugueses are familiar to them and they can easly reproduce
Tha same happens:
Greek-Spanish
Portuguese-Russian
My mom is a fluent spanish speaker from central america and she overheard some people speaking what she thought was spanish, she asked them directions in spanish and they had to take a second to process it. turns out it they were speaking italian lol
@@HeadbangerPars I think between those three languages, people from portuguese speaking countries, spanish and italian as well, can understand the basics without learning the languages!
I like how you find it funny that "vsplesk" has only one vowel, while "splash" is sweating nervously in the corner.
I'm only now, when the word всплеск (vsplesk/splash) is written in Latin letters, understanding , that the words sound perfectly different, but they have something in common... Hmmmm... Interesting
@@taemck3946 not so different. Cfr: vSPlesk and SPlash :-)
@@constantinekuchenko1936 yep. It's interesting.
He pronounced it evenbetter than Spanish people ou even Brazilians!
I speak neither Portuguese nor Russian but I have often felt they sound similar. How? I guess to me they both sound "soft" and FULL of the kind of shushing sound zh, zh, zh and with few vowels. Interestingly I do speak Spanish and it's so clear in writing that that Spanish and Portuguese are closely related, so much that you can grasp a good deal of the meaning, still it's hard for me to pick out the meaning of Portuguese when spoken. Anyways. I think both those languages are beautiful.
There's a brazilian-russian couple that have a youtube channel called Wally e Dasha. The woman is russian and her accent in portuguese is perfect. I think it have to do with the similar sounds in both languages
I am a Filipino and I found that European Portuguese really sounds like Slavic like Russian language.
The most curious think in this video: the guy promounces the words in portuguese perfectly. It's impressive. He sounds like a portuguese guy. (I am from Brazil)
Phonetics is such a amazing thing, no?
The devoicing of муж only happens when the ж is at the end of the word or syllable, so when you add a suffix, like мужем, the consonant is voiced back, especially due to the presence of the vowel е.
I am from Portugal, and I can say that the people from Lisbon (capital of portugal) tend to shorten the vogals a lot more than the people from other regions, but we all do it a bit, you know, accents...
I'm Romanian - living in the East, close to the border, in Moldavia. Our dialect includes sounds that are similar to Russian and Portuguese, but it's still Romanian.
In 1992 I spent two weeks in Wales. Our host used to listen to the radio and one day he found a Russian channel. Hearing Russian in Wales, all of a sudden, was so unexpected that we laughed a little. Our host asked, "What are they saying? On the radio." We shrugged. "No idea." "What?! Don't you speak Russian?" "No." He had been under the impression that Romanian was a Russian dialect. (!!!)
Ok, we say "da", but even in this case the pronunciation is slightly different. In Russian, d is softer, warmer, and the a is somewhat longer. In Romanian, "da" is crisp.
There are some clear influences - in terms of sounds and vocabulary - from Slavic languages, but Romanian is not a dialect of Russian.
This is probably, the reason why all Slavs learn to speak such a good Portuguese. As Portuguese native, I can tell...
I am a portuguese national and when I worked with russians and ucranians , when they spoke among themselfs ,from a distance ,I had to tell myself that it was not portugues.,like the general noise was really familiar somehow .
I'm Portuguese and when I travel people think I speak Romanian or Polish... I don't get a lot of Russian. Something to note, we have a lot of Polish and Ukrainian immigrants and they pick up the language really fast and they don't have a hard time pronouncing Portuguese words (normally people struggle with Portuguese). Even you in the video pronounced the words really well :)
Polish and Portuguese both have nasal vovels, Polish ą = om = on and ę = en = em.
poles comes to Portugal for work?
@@MrCr00wn Well, they used to. Nowadays I really don't know...
as a portuguese "volya" sound like "folha" ( leaf ). When i speak english some people say that i sound a russian trying to speak english
My first language is Portuguese (from Brazil). When I hear a Slavic language from a distance, or say, in a noisy caffe, the phonetics are indeed similar to Portuguese. Also, a Polish person heard me speaking Portuguese and she told me I sounded Polish! I find these similarities really interesting. 🌻
The first time I heard someone speak European Portuguese I definitely thought it sounded sort of Slavic. But I don't speak either language so...
"Shwa" is a neutral, open sound in IPA (international phonetic language), that is a tool to write down most of world's languages phonetically - how they sound like. It is not concerned with spelling, only with the pronunciation of the words. When it comes to Russian and Polish, i find IPA to be not ideal at best (classical singer here, trained in IPA, Polish native).
Shwa is a bit similar to Polish vowel "y", but lighter and not as much in throat. If you know any French, shwa is the sound commonly found on the ends of words, for example "lune" - the "e" is not a full pronounced E, but rather a neutral, difficult to describe sound.
best way I would describe it is as the sound at the start of the word 'about' or in the second syllable of 'London'
My experience is that how schwa sounds really depends on the language that has it. The main thing is that it is a reduced unstressed vowel that is also central. The reason for this variance is that the central space is the biggest in the whole of the vowel space and also that vowels in the surrounding syllables of the word tend to influence schwa's simply because the tongue doesn't have to move as much.
But yes, the definition of schwa in English is far too broad for my Danish ears, especially when 'a' at the beginning of words is concerned (like 'about'). The reason is that it sounds a lot like one of our stressed vowels, but that vowel doesn't exist in English phonology, so it's perceived as a schwa.
But yes, I think the future of describing vowel sounds in linguistics is brightening because more people who have native experience can choose which vowel symbols or cardinal vowels best describe the actual vowels. I think there is potential and perhaps a need for more schwa sound symbols to be made. Anyway, I'll stop here. This is the sort of stuff I'm writing about in my bachelor's thesis so I can get a little carried away xD
@@rasmusn.e.m1064 I agree it depends heavily on language, but so does every other sound. Open Polish vowels are nowhere near open French vowels in terms of 'opennes', yet they are open anyway. Polish and French nasals are completely different, yet described by the same symbols. That's one of the reasons why I find the IPA to be not ideal at most, because if you have no idea about a language, from IPA you'd get an approximation of pronunciation, enough to be understood but quite far off from the native sounds.
@@rasmusn.e.m1064 also in French schwa and other neutral sounds are heavily dependant on the preceeding or following vowel, adjusting into more closed or open sounds to match the vowel in question (at least according to my French teacher), so schwa can have a lot of slightly different sounds overall
@@AnnaEmilka Very interesting to read about your experiences with Polish and French! I agree that the IPA can be misleading in its broadest application (ie. without diacritics) because you can easily describe completely different phonological phenomena with the same symbols just because they happen to overlap phonetically or vice versa. I think IPA in its narrow application is actually quite decent at describing the nuances of speech sounds, even though it is biased in fx how it does not represent the tense vs lax contrast very well.
As far as I am aware, Polish nasal vowels are basically slightly nasalised vowels followed by a velar nasal. Is that correct?
That's what I have seen it described as in IPA and it is not the way French nasal vowels are typically represented. I guess the reason it's still called nasal vowels is for historical reasons. -I believe Proto-Slavic had nasal vowels as well.
Once I was on a train in Italy and heard two Brazilian girls talking (I'm br), but I could not recognize their accent even when I was paying attention to them. It took like one whole minute to realize they were Russians, not brs.
There's a big Ukrainian community in Portugal and it's impressive how good they speak, in general, after only one year, specially accent wise. Btw, your "felizmente" was really spot on! Great video!
I speak Russian and a little bit of Spanish, and I always said that Portuguese sounds like someone is speaking Spanish with a heavy Russian accent.
I am a native Polish speaker. I admit that many years ago before I've seen these video, at many occasion I rode a public bus in an american city, noticing passengers around me talking among themselves in a language I first recognized as Polish. But when I approached them closer it appeared they were either Brazilian, Portuguese, Cape Verdeans, Azoreans. It happened many times.
I'm a native Ukrainian and Russian speaker and this has ALWAYS been something I've noticed as I've interacted with many other immigrants, and I'm often trying to understand different slavic languages. Then I heard Portuguese and I'm like, wtf, why does this sound so familiar even though it's totally different? As he describes, it's a much stronger effect if you're not completely paying attention or have some distance from the speaker.
For decades I didn't understand why such different languages could ever sound similar, but even today when I hear Portuguese, my Ukrainian and Russian language brain takes about 1.5 sentences to realize it's not intelligible.
it's the fact that they're both stressed timed languages. that's the only similarities. one is Latin based , the other Slavic.
@@bconni2did you even watch the video
Dude, you nailed the European Portuguese pronunciation!!!!
For Information The Portugues word PÃO (Bread) is what gave the Japanese Word for Bread (PAN パン
)
Greeting FROM MAGHREB, MAROKKO MARROKO MARRUECOS MOROCCO,
(WHAT EVER YOU CHOOSE)
As someone who speaks Portuguese I’ve never thought Portuguese sounds like Russian.
I like when you said 'shuba', because that exactly how northern portuguese say 'chuva', which means 'rain'.
👍😁😁😁
Confirmo
At 09:20 when Vlad tries to say faz três it reminded me that Vlad cannot roll his 'r' - lol
I don't know if Portuguese sounds like Russian or Polish, but when I speak Portuguese in front of people who have never heard the European dialect of Portuguese, many ask me why I'm speaking Russian.
You prounouced PT-PT words VERY accurately. Almost any person who don't speak Portugal's Portuguese (Yes, "European Portuguese" concept sucks tbh) can't prounouce as good (excelent) as you. You just nailed it perfectly!!!!
12:32 that's beautiful. love when you discover, or see other people discover, the allophony in your language that you don't think about, but that's exactly why it's allophonic.
13:06 also (and I don't speak Russian) if that sentence uses the word му́жем (or whatever the proper spelling is), then the ж isn't at the end of the word anymore, which is why you're be pronouncing it as voiced. basically, its normally voiceless in муж and voiced му́жем.
Every time my sister and I spoke to each other in Portuguese(we're brazilians) in public in New York, everybody thought we were speaking Russian
“Sounds like Polish” 😱
When he realises he also thinks portuguese sounds like polish
I'm a native portuguese speaker from Portugal and i honestly never thought russian and portuguese sounded alike. But when you said some of the portuguese words, they sounded really like an actual portuguese, more than if an english speaker tried to pronounce those words.
I was in Portugal for vacation in 2019 and it sounds like Polish from longer distance, it's truth. I would not say Russian, but Polish. It's full of ŠŽ sounds, everything is softened. But you must hear it from longer distance, from close distance you ofcourse know it's not Polish. I think schwa is something not pronounced clearly or 2 sounds mixed together if I understand it correctly, we don't have such thing in Czech, but someone said that Y on end of word in Polish is schwa after I said they pronouncing it like combination of Y and E. As a Czech, I can clearly hear that when Polish person says "dobry" there is not clear Y, it's more like Y+E together which was very confusing for me when I was in Poland, I didn't know if I should saying dzień dobry or dzień dobre, after some time in Poland I started saying it somewhere between because that's how I hear that from native speakers.
D/ T and S/Z or Š/Ž are very often swaped in slavic langauges, it's not schwa, it's just about what is easier to pronounc, try to say muž really with ž, it's not easy, say muš is much more easy, same like votka, not vodka, you just can't say vodka really with D, that's why it's pronounced with T. In Russian you can say MUŽ because of their accent makes word longer, in Czech we can't say MUŽ, you would have to say separately MU and Ž. But most importantly, we don't use word muž much often in spoken language.
LH in Portuguese sounds like Slovak softened L to me, as a Czech, I can't pronounce that.
When you said "shuba" it sounded like "chuva", it means rain in portuguese.
I lived in Czechia for two years and learned Czech. Then when I was in Milan one day I heard a group speaking and I asked them if they spoke Czech. I was embarrassed when they said 'no we are from Brazil.
13:37 - In polish, last consonants also become voiceless. f.e. Lekarz (Cyrillic script: Льэкаж), would become Lekasz (Cyrillic script: Льэкаш). The same thing happens to "муж". You just don't realise it when you normally speak.
Great example is Megawonsz9
The way you said "felizmente" proves the point, sorry. Case closed.
Lol Totally, that was all the evidence right there! It was so incredible!
I'm português i cant see it but i have friends from different country's from Europe and they say i sound Russian.
I was learning Portuguese at some point, and mistakenly a TV commentator (football match) speaking Portuguese - it was actually Russian!. That was the time I realized these two languages can be mistaken by non-natives.
* Yes, certain languages SOUND like certain other languages TO THE EARS OF NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS when they were spoken faster. It's obviously NOT to the ears of native speakers.
There is some words in Russian and Portuguese that are similar and basically are pronounced the same way. Like leader for example. Also both languages are harsh and loud languages.
Minete é uma delas!!
It's not that hard to believe. When I spoke Portuguese in front of my friends they said I was speaking Russian hehe😂
Manda-os para o caralho.
About муж : I think the main point is that, when you speak fast, it tends to become voiceless, if it's at the end of the word. In the sentence you say at 13:06, I think you say мужем, and in this case, the ж isn't at the end of the word, so it stays voiced.
Don't worry, though, it's hard to analyze our own language; I've often tried to analyze how I pronounce things only to then become self-conscious about it and being unsure of what I actually do when I don't think about it lol
yeah, when I was editing I realized that it wasn't fait to compare муж и мужем. Also, I agree about your own language. People ask me way to much how to learn Russian. How tf I know lol
@@vladkast one more example is друг (friend) pronounced like [ druk ] or флаг (flag) pronounced like [ flak]
There's a video on Langfocus comparing Greek and Spanish phonology. Worth give it a try!
i'm good
portuguese is my second second language and I do find a lot of similarities in the sound. sometimes people are speaking Russian or Ukrainian and it sounds like portuguese from afar somehow. also your pronunciation on the portuguese words were actually really really good!
One major thing that you are forgetting. From Portugal many people were kicked out of there in the 16th century. They were told become catholic or leave the country. Many people said they became catholic but really didn’t. My family was part of that. I am Jewish, and some of my family didn’t wish to stop being Jew. Thus many people back then moved to Poland, Ukraine and Russia. That is partly why Russian sounds like Polish/Russian.
i find more similar the portuguese from portugal because of the pronociation
Portuguese is portuguese what you mean is that you find it more similar to the ACCENT from Portugal.
@@frapiment6239 probably she's brazilian
Fun fact: I've met people from Ukraine and Moldova in Portugal, and it's fascinating how quickly you guys pick up Portuguese! I also know an Ukranian I work with in Toronto, that used to live in Portugal for many years and speaks Portuguese fluently. Not that common to see that in Toronto :)
This topic is very common and it makes sense. This is very accurate its just a matter of sounds but the vocabulary is completly diferent. Portuguese basicly have every type of sounds thats why portuguese people learn foreign languages easily. One i hear all the time is that portuguese sounds like a mix of polisch and german.
When Brazilians speak Spanish, they tend to sound just like Slavs speaking Spanish.
I'm Portuguese and Russian is in no way shape or form near Portuguese in any aspect except that both languages like others (german for example) are spoken from the throat, still curious as to how a slav might think about this... btw 13:00 when U say husband in Russian a Portuguese speaker is hearing the Portuguese word MUGE which means MOO (from a cow)
Im portuguese and i was so happy when i heard you speaking my language!
To me, Russian soft consonants sound like there's a slight "i" after the consonant. But now that I saw this video, yeah, totally sounds like Portuguese "nh", "lh" and so on. Btw, Tom Scott also has made some interesting videos on language, and here's one if you wanna know more about "schwa":
th-cam.com/video/qu4zyRqILYM/w-d-xo.html
as a native portuguese, I can confirm that russian sounds a lot like portuguese at a distance, I discovered this while playing cyberpunk where I was listening to a conversation between 2 npc and was like, "wtf is that portuguese from portugal?" but it was russian
I am Brazilian and some years ago I have heard a mother talking to her daughter in a ´misterious` Slavic language. For my suprise, she was talking in European Portuguese and I remarked this after some time...
As a Brazilian, I’m baffled! I also couldn’t hear any resemblance between them before the video.
It would be cool if you had a Portuguese speaker (European or Brazilian) to break down how Portuguese is pronounced to you, like you’re doing with Russian. Great video!
Volya sounds almost the same as FOLHA (leaf or sheet of paper).
This is funny because I just recently saw some videos of a russian woman who immigrated to Brazil and is learning portuguese, She aways says that 'my portuguese isn't good' but can read and speak quite well for a person that is only learning a language for a year
I am Portuguese and when I went to France with my sister the wife of a Polish man asked if we were Polish while we were shopping. We don't think of the similarities of the languages because we are used to earing them but watching how easily you could say tenho and trabalho shows that those similarities makes it easier to pronouce. I can't make French speakers say BACALHAU correctly instead of BACALAU even at gunpoint hahaha
when you in 13th minute use the example "mužem" you have "e" after "ž", but when you say muž.... because it is in the end it can turn turn to "š", it is in a free position, as apposed to mužem... the "shwa" sound is a phonethic terminology, that is hoe anx language can be transcribed, so if you can read phonethic alphabet you could in theory read sth. perfectlx without understanding a word
I’m liking the video before watching it ❤️
nice!
Human of future
I'm liking and commenting, also loving the videos in general.
as a Polish, Portuguese doesn't sound Polish to me, maybe a bit Slavic (like mix of every slavic) , but it sound like they are "singing" and some of the words sounds "prolonged" like they are loooong usually at the eeeeend. I work with people from Portugal and i feel like they have a lot of "Sz(ш), Ś ( щ), ż (ж)" sounds.
I'm a portuguese native speaker, and a few years ago i did erasmus in Poland.
It happened to me, a lot of times, to hear polish speakers and think it was portuguese, but, as you said, only when the person was too far for it to be understood or when i wasn't paying attention to what the person was saying. But only on a fonetic sense, the vocabulary as nothing to do with one another.
I am a native speaker of Spanish and Portuguese. European Portuguese doesn't sound like Spanish at all.
My guess is with the /ə/ he's referring to how a word is spoken versus written in a language. The schwa comes from the International Phonetic Alphabet.
It is a vowel that is produced in the middle of the kids the and requires the least effort so it becomes a common pronunciation in many words despite the lack of a letter for it in many languages.
For example, in the word definite, it is pronounced in american English as "defin-uh-t". In the root worse "finite" both 'i's have short vowel sounds like in the word "igloo". However, "def" is stressed in the word definite, so the 'i' becomes reduce to the /ə/ (which sounds like 'uh' sort of).
And this rule applies to many languy outside of English. There's a wonderfully really short vid by Tom Scott on /ə/ on TH-cam titled - "ə: The Most Coming Vowel in English". And again this is just me deducting, idk for sure what the guy ment in the video.
TL;DR the /ə/ refers the vowel pronunciation when SPOKEN, not just straightforward spelling
You’re so close to 20k Vlad!!!
Yep, 20003
You did really good pronouncing the Portuguese words, sounded native 😱
It's funny because Russian people find it easier to learn Portuguese than people of other nationalities like English. At least that's what my aunt, a Portuguese teacher, says. I hope that one day you can come to Portugal to find out for yourself.
A hug from Portugal 🇵🇹
Hey Vlad. The reason you think you disagree with him on the pronunciation of "муж" is because when you put a grammatical ending on the word, like how you said "мужем", the vowel that's now following the ж is a voiced sound and therefore throws the ж back into being voiced. In other words, the ж only stays pronounced like ш when there's no sound immediately following it or another unvoiced sound.
Just to let you know, a schwa is a neutral sound, like when your mouth is relaxed. It changes slightly depending on the sounds before or after, but more or less sounds like an "ah" when alone.
it is the most common vowel sound in English
It sounds more like "uh"
I am portuguese from Lisbon. A couple of months ago i was zapping on tv and ended on a channel i first thought was a portuguese one. I paid attention for some minutes, thinking what new channel is this? And then i realised that i wasnt understanding a single word of that "portuguese". I was wathing a BULGARIAN channel !!! It sounded just like portuguese! 😂🤣😂😂
Devias estar com uma bebedeira.
Thanks for this, it was very interesting. I speak Spanish (as a second language) and I've always thought that Portuguese sounds like a Russian speaking Spanish because the words are similar to Spanish but the sound of the language is more similar to Slavic languages.
Once I was abroad in the back of an Uber with a friend and he was talking Portuguese on the phone with his mother and then when we asked the Uber driver something in English he said "yes" in Russian. We were so confused lmao
The soft sign you mentioned it's a "jer" from Old Church Slavonic ;) , we use 'n' and 'ń ' to soften the sound
"jer" you mentioned is the hard sign and came from Old East Slavic. The soft sign is "front jer".
Yes, that's true.
I'm portuguese working together with foreigners for more than 30 years and i realized that that confusion between portuguese and slavic languages is because we use a lot of "sh" sounds.
In portuguese all the words ending with "s" have the "sh" sound. Also all the "s" before a consonant sounds "sh".
I also speak bulgarian and i can identify the similarities, but you need to be able to distantiate yourself from your own language.
Ha ha, when I heard despresar's pronunciation I was like "yeah, that sounds like something that could be Polish, but not Russian". We're psheki afterall ;)
Well, I'm from Brazil, therefore I'm a brazilian portuguese speaker - and sometimes I consider particularly hard to understand perfectly european portuguese (and thats because european portuguese is a stressed timed lenguage while brazilian portuguese syllable-timed).
So, with a little bit of goodwill (lol) I can see why some people think european portuguese may sound like russian.
As a matter of fact, last years I was tripping around Rome with some brazilian friends and, of course, we were speaking portuguese when a russian girl (at least I think she was russian lol) who was passing thru heared us and asked:
- Russian?
And we answered:
- No, we are brazilians.
And she:
- Oh, ok, sorry....
Faz todo sentido eles serem stressed timed e nós sillable timed. Quando estive em Portugal me pareceu que a dicção deles é diferente. Tanto pelo ritmo de fala quanto por comerem vogais das sílabas átonas. Enquanto nós tendemos a pronunciar todas as letras tanto das sílabas tônicas quanto das sílabas átonas. Aprendi algo hoje. Kkkkkk