Portuguese
O presidente venezuelano, Hugo Chávez, ameaçou no domingo expulsar o embaixador norte-americano em Caracas se ele continuar realizando o que o mandatário qualificou como atos de provocação em seu país.
Above: written Portuguese (Source: Reuters)
There are over 200 million speakers of Portuguese worldwide. Portuguese is spoken in Brazil, Portugal, Mozambique, East Timor, Angola, and a smattering of other nations in Africa. You will also hear Portuguese spoken in the Chinese territory of Macao.
Portuguese is a Romance language, and it bears a striking resemblance to Spanish. If you decide to learn Portuguese after first learning Spanish, you will notice many familiar words and grammatical concepts. A few words are the same in same in both languages. For example, the word for “flower” is the same in either tongue: flor. Many other words differ only slightly across the two: (P) muito = (S) mucho (“much”); (P) língua = (S) lengua (“language”). Many ex-students of Spanish are delighted to find themselves understanding whole chunks of written Portuguese the first time they encounter it.
But don’t get too overconfident if you already happen to know Spanish. While your background in español will enable you to passively understand some Portuguese from the beginning, more work will be required for you to actually speak or write it correctly.
On balance, Portuguese is somewhat more difficult than Spanish. You will need to do some listening before you fully get your ears and tongue around the nasalized sounds of Portuguese; and Portuguese grammar is considerably more complex than that of Spanish.
There are two major dialects of Portuguese: Continental and Brazilian. Continental Portuguese is spoken in Portugal, and Brazilian Portuguese is spoken in South America’s most populous nation. Most self-study audio courses favor the Continental variety (unless the course specifically indicates that it teaches “Brazilian Portuguese.”) If you learn either one, you will be able to pick up the other with minimal effort. The chief differences between the two are accent and the pronunciations of certain letters. There are only a few minor differences in vocabulary to contend with.
Portuguese is a valuable language today because of the growing economic and political clout of Brazil. Some educated Brazilians do of course speak English. But my observation after an extended business trip to the São Paulo area is that most Brazilians do not. If you have read my book Why You Need a Foreign Language & How to Learn One, then you know that I advocate learning the other side’s language even if they already do speak yours. In the case of Brazil, however, learning Portuguese is an absolute necessity for getting around outside the international tourist areas
